Vernon Subutex 2

Description: "Originally published in French in 2015 by âEditions Grasset & Fasquelle, France. English translation originally published in 2018 by MacLehose Press, Great Britain"--Title page verso.

Brief description: Frank Wynne has translated the work of numerous French and Hispanic authors, including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Virginie Despentes. His work has earned him many prizes, including the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with Houellebecq for The Elementary Particles. Most recently, his translation of Jean-Baptiste Del Amo's Animalia won the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Review Quotes:

"It's bastards across the board in Virginie Despentes's brilliantly unshackled trilogy "Vernon Subutex", whose second volume is now available in Frank Wynne's eruptive translation from the French . . . What keeps you reading is the voice--acerbic, unconstrained, bitterly funny and, despite the book's intimations of enlightenment, perpetually pissed off. Ms. Despentes has a deep and abiding rage against conformity--against "the standardization of desire"--that only a renunciation as thoroughgoing as Vernon's seems capable of overcoming."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Virginie Despentes is a true original, a punk rock George Eliot with a keen taste for the pitiable innards of her characters: no one else has her slyly penetrating eye, her spiky sense of humor, her razor wit that cuts like wire through the accumulated crud of our age's default thought patterns. In her masterful hands, Vernon Subutex becomes a droll, hilarious, insightful record of our unfortunate times."
--Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

"Cool, plentiful, and absolute genius. Virginie Despentes has a license to ill. Vernon Subutex is one of the best books of this decade."
--Alex Gilvarry, author of Eastman Was Here

"The apparent deaths by drug overdose of indie rock star Alex Bleach and his porn star ex-girlfriend unite a motley crew of armchair investigators in this rollicking second volume of a trilogy set in 2014 Paris . . . Such is the snowballing effect of this sexed-up epic, an achievement greater than the sum of its wildly colorful parts."
--Publisher's Weekly (starred)

"The second book in her trilogy Vernon Subutex, Despentes' novel brings a jaundiced eye to pornography, drug addiction, and punk rock in the noirish titular story of record shop owner and eventual homeless messiah guru who has tapes concerning the dead rock star Alex Bleach. Like William S. Burroughs updated for the age of WhatsApp, Vernon Subutex 2 straps our current world to a chair and interrogates the hell out of it."
--The Millions