Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| King Kong Theory | 2006 | Buy |
Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Baise-Moi | 1993 | Buy |
| Apocalypse Baby | 2013 | Buy |
| Bye Bye Blondie | 2016 | Buy |
| Pretty Things | 2018 | Buy |
| Dear Dickhead | 2022 | Buy |
Vernon Subutex Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Vernon Subutex 1 | 2017 | Buy |
| Vernon Subutex 2 | 2018 | Buy |
| Vernon Trodon, 3 | 2017 | N/A |
| Vernon Subutex 3 | 2020 | Buy |
Virginie Despentes was born in Nancy in 1969, left school at 17, and spent her late teens and early twenties working in a Lyon record shop, as a maid, and as a sex worker before publishing her first novel. Baise-Moi appeared in 1994, when she was 23. The book drew directly on her own experience of being gang-raped at 17, and the anger that drives it is unmediated and deliberate. She co-directed the 2000 film adaptation, which was briefly banned in France. Her pen name — Despentes, from des pentes, “from the hills” — refers to La Croix-Rousse, a working-class neighbourhood on Lyon’s slopes.
Her non-fiction manifesto King Kong Theory (2006) became a landmark in French feminist thought, arguing from autobiographical experience that the mainstream feminist conversation ignored the realities faced by women outside the middle-class mainstream. The Prix Renaudot — France’s second most prestigious literary prize — came in 2010 for Apocalypse Baby, a crime thriller following a private detective and a fixer called the Hyena as they track a missing teenager from Paris to Barcelona. Then came the Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015-2017 in French; 2017-2020 in English, translated by Frank Wynne), shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize — a panoramic social epic following a homeless ex-record-shop owner as a cross-section of French society drifts through his story.
Despentes was elected to the Academie Goncourt in 2016. Her prose style in Frank Wynne’s English translations is blunt, fast, and deliberately vernacular — she writes, as one critic noted, not as other people speak but as she speaks. That quality makes her work feel immediate and hard to look away from even when it is most uncomfortable.