SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
Clarissa in times of Covid
RON JACOBS relishes a riotous epistolary novel of revenge against sexual harassment and patriarchy
NO PRISONERS TAKEN: Virginie Despentes
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
Dear Dickhead
Virginie Despentes, MacLehose Press, £14.99
VIRGINIE DESPENTES is a French author. A runaway, sex worker, punk rocker and iconoclast, her newest novel, titled Dear Dickhead, features a protagonist accused of sexual harassment and stalking his assistant.
This protagonist, who is a popular crime novelist, is called out by his victim during the period of the so-called #Metoo movement. The victim conducts her campaign on a personal blog that functions as a journal wherein she describes her experiences, the mental health crisis the harassment caused and her desire to destroy the man who victimised her.
The result, as it is played out in the novel’s pages, is vivid, sometimes humorous, painful and problematic. It is a battle of the sexes played by 2020 rules. The house formerly dominated by the male of the species doesn’t always have the odds in its favour.
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