Virginie Despentes’ Dear Dickhead is a vicious, funny, bruised epistolary novel about the intimacy of writing to someone you claim to despise.

Built through emails and messages between a washed-up novelist, a film actress, and a young feminist blogger, it moves through online outrage and private collapse with Despentes’ usual combination of fury, filth, intelligence, and weird tenderness. Virginie Despentes is one of contemporary French literature’s great literary irritants, in the best possible sense: novelist, filmmaker, punk witness, former sex worker, and author of Baise-moi, King Kong Theory, and the Vernon Subutex trilogy. Her work has long circled sex, violence, shame, class, celebrity, addiction, feminism, and the social scripts people pretend they’ve transcended.

Good for readers of Rachel Kushner, Chris Kraus, Deborah Levy, Virginie Despentes generally, and anyone who likes their literary fiction with teeth still attached.

Hardback edition, first published in Great Britain in 2024 by Fitzcarraldo / Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle in translation by Frank Wynne. Very good to near fine condition, with only light handling wear visible. Internal pages appear clean and well kept.