Virginie Despentes, 1998. (Photo by Raphaël GAILLARDE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) In 2006, Virginie Despentes published a manifesto called King Kong Theory, an origin story that begins with her rape ...

People walk past a McDonald’s restaurant near the Café Bonne Biere in Paris, 2016. (Photo by Philippe Lopez / AFP via Getty Images) Midway through the last book of Vernon Subutex, Virginie Despentes’s ...

The wild child author of Baise-Moi and former sex worker has completed a trilogy, Vernon Subutex, which has secured her renown as a ‘rock’n’roll Zola’ In her living room in northern Paris, Virginie ...

Virginie Despentes confronts sexual politics in an epistolary novel with a stubbornly idealistic streak. By Joumana Khatib Joumana Khatib is an editor at the Book Review. When you purchase an ...

I first read Virginie Despentes about ten years ago, when an English translation of her book “King Kong Theory,” a collection of essays on gender and sexuality, started making the rounds among my ...

“I’m a little old now to be an enfant terrible,” says Virginie Despentes. Nonetheless, it’s a label she’s worn proudly since her brilliant, incendiary manifesto, King Kong Theory, was published in ...

On March 1, 2020, roughly two weeks before the COVID lockdown began in France, the French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes published an essay in the left-leaning paper Libération. The essay, ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Dear Dickhead (French: Cher Connard) opens with a scathing Instagram post. A man writes that he spotted a ...

Flashes of vulgar energy and trademark cynicism enliven an overlong finale of ageing French rockers When the first volume in the punk-feminist writer Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy ...

With her strident, pro-sex views, Despentes upsets people on the left and right. After years of being ignored and derided, she is finally being welcomed by France’s literary establishment. By Laura ...