Playboy

Challenging yet empowering ... refreshing * The New York Times *
At once cavernous and concise ... it is sharply observed, cool, and unbiased in its assessment of human folly. * New York Review of Books *
A continued, decisive force of writing * Irish Times *
Shocking for its psychologically blank, bare-knuckle swagger * Daily Telegraph *
You can't help but think of her work falling in the tradition of Annie Ernaux, just edgier. Her prose is gorgeously spare and practical * Irish Independent *
Fascinating ... Playboy is a story of bravery and ultimate personal freedom, and the costs that come with it * Buzz Magazine *
Bold and brash and at the same time quietly controlled ... Debré is brilliantly deadpan -- Chloë Ashby * Spectator *
Her scalpel-like stylistic approach makes the rebellious content of Debré's novels resonate all the more * Prospect *
This is the most addictive book I've read since I can remember... Debré's observations about how men see women, and how she now sees women in turn, as a lesbian, are brutal and revelatory. Read the earth-shatteringly emotional Love Me Tender next, where Debré fights to keep custody of her young son post-divorce, despite her ex-husband's best efforts * AnOther Magazine *
In Playboy, the French novelist Constance Debré is radical in shucking off not only the trappings of matrimony but also of class -- Mia Levitin * Financial Times *
Debré's voice is like a diamond drill boring through stone ... that cold sliver of voice, conducting electricity at a high voltage, sending the occasional shower of sparks off the page * Bookforum *
Playboy is an unparalleled document of desire that flies in the face of societal expectations. Debré's narrator pursues her own with a restless curiosity, all the more intense for its ambivalence, and calm coexistence with the emotional shrapnel left in its wake. This crushing bluntness is at once wounding, unmooring and transcendent; I can't get it out of my head -- Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul
Playboy is a book that explodes what it means to be a woman in lust with another woman in a heteronormative world. An essential read -- Joelle Taylor, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning author of C+nto
This was my first Debré and will certainly not be my last. Playboy has no interest in the comfort of its readers. It is defiant, probing, hot, occasionally cruel, and never, ever sorry -- Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes
Playboy is written in sharp, searing, and tender vignettes, peppered with desire, banality, and skewering takes on heteronormativity. Debré looks the reader right in the eye, and doesn't blink. It's a book that makes other books possible -- Jenna Clake, author of Disturbance
Constance Debré has the power to make you gasp like no other writer - it's a thrill to be back with her taught-af prose rendered brilliantly into English by Holly James's translation. Playboy is a razor sharp exposition of desire and the rocky paths we follow as we try to sate ourselves. As ever, too, Debré dispenses swiftly with bourgeois heterosexual moral codes, exposing the hypocrisies at the heart of French society -- Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires
Playboy is a classic of the queer canon, exploring untilled ideas of bourgeois relationship to class, to body, and to sexuality. Debre's narrator is detached, distanced and at times brutal, approaching attraction with a lingering sense of ennui rising to hostility. The protagonist wrestles with the idea of the masculine female, and navigates internalised misogyny in a journey that leads back to the self. In writing that is as economic and incisive as it is sensuous and poetic, Playboy is a book that explodes what it means to be a woman in lust with another woman in a heteronormative world. An essential read. -- Joelle Taylor, author of The Night Alphabet
Praise for Constance Debré -- :
Tight, present-tense prose ... genuinely inspiring * Financial Times *
A deadpan, tensile thread of a voice: calm, Camusian, comic, stark, relentless, and totally hypnotic -- Rachel Kushner
Debré writes matter of factly, fluidly, scabrously, laying bare the hypocrisies of society, of institutions, of families ... direct the way a laser is direct -- Lauren Elkin
Committed to truth-telling, no matter how rough, but also intriguingly suspended in a cloud of unknowing and pain, Love Me Tender is a wry, original, agonizing book destined to become a classic of its kind -- Maggie Nelson
A consideration of metamorphosis, motherhood and sexuality that feels bold and true * AnOther Magazine *