Read Our Interview of Love Me Tender Author Constance Debré →

Author Constance Debre at Paris coffee shop.

Until Semiotext(e) published Love Me Tender, Constance Debré was unknown in the United States. Like most French novelists, Debré’s life and literary career happen in Paris, a city she’s called home since birth, a city that seems to have shaped her classic French distaste for many current American cultural exports and obsessions. And perhaps it’s that Parisian je ne sais quoi that helps explain, in part, Love Me Tender’s splashy reception among American literati. Few foreign novels get translated and even fewer receive glowing reviews in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The LA Review of Books. So, why is this novel appealing to Americans? And what does its embrace say about US literature? 

Love Me Tender follows an unnamed narrator who abandons her bourgeois marriage and law job to become a writer. Along the way, the protagonist loses custody of her young son after her spurned ex-husband weaponizes her newfound lesbianism against her. In a surreal literary twist, the ex-husband’s attorney convinces the courts that her collection of books by Genet, Bataille and de Sade prove her degeneracy and the embittered ex wins full custody. As the narrator’s legal appeals inch through the French courts, she writes, swims and takes many lovers, her months punctuated by awkward, chaperoned visits with her son at a state-run center once every fifteen days. Love Me Tender is a painful examination of motherhood, family, and the lines an artist must draw between themself and the world. But it’s also a punky take on sex and freedom drawn from Debré’s own biography, though the novelist provocatively insists that the book is not ‘about’ her.

Reading the novel in LA during the waning days of 2022, I couldn’t help but see in it a rebuke of the current literary moment, one often critiqued as straight-jacketed by moral and social objectives. On the other hand Love Me Tender is deliciously French, the narrator unsentimental, blasé even about choosing literature over motherhood, responsibility, and the trappings of upper-middle-class life. 

Originally, Debré and I met at the LA launch of Love Me Tender in October, 2022. After inhaling the novel, I invited her to read at my reading series Casual Encountersz — I was curating one in Paris and Debré enthusiastically accepted. Though a health issue ultimately kept her from the event, we met the following afternoon at Chez Jeannette, a bistro in Strasbourg Saint Denis popular among Parisian artists, writers, and glitterati. Debré, like the narrator in Love Me Tender, has a swimmer’s build and in person she’s warm and intellectual, kind of grand in her own way, gently tapping sugar crystals into an espresso, often palming her buzzed head of hair. Despite the lousy January weather, we sit outside, Debré across from me with her back to the street, just beyond Chez Jeannette’s awning. Though it drizzles throughout our conversation, Debré seems indifferent to the rain. Read more.

Thought Girl Winter: Read Our Interview Of Nada Alic →


interview by Annabel Graham
portraits by Paige Strabala

I first met Nada Alic in the fall of 2019, in New York, at a literary reading held at the Nolita headquarters of a women’s sleepwear brand. The small storefront was packed, and readers perched on the edge of a gigantic feather bed in the center of the room. Most of the guests were there to see a certain Instagram poet with an especially rabid fan base—I witnessed actual tears of joy when said poet opened her mouth—but it was Alic who captured my attention. Radiating her trademark blend of confidence, self-deprecation, and deadpan humor, she read from a short story in progress. In it, an anxious, painfully cerebral young woman questions “this whole business of being alive,” pursues an obsessive friendship with a woman named Mona, and considers the pros and cons of lightly grazing her hand across a stranger’s penis. At a cocktail party with her husband’s business associates, Alic’s narrator muses: “They all looked so vulnerable, so up for grabs; concealed only by a thin layer of fabric. I imagined them as windchimes waiting to be struck. The impulse wasn’t sexual, it was destructive. I just stood there, not touching anyone’s penis, quietly frightened by who I was and what I was capable of.” Suffice it to say that I was riveted.

Alic and I struck up a conversation after the reading, exchanged email addresses, and made loose plans to get together for a coffee next time I was in Los Angeles, where she lives. What followed almost immediately was a global pandemic, a government-imposed lockdown, and a 19th-century sort of pen-pal correspondence conducted over the entire year of 2020. Alic’s emails are just as surprising and enjoyable as her short fiction—witty, dark, vulnerable, sharp-edged; weird in all the best ways. The story she read that night in New York (featuring the penis-windchime simile that’s eternally burned into my brain) is now entitled “My New Life”—this past year, it was published in the literary journal No Tokens, where I serve as fiction editor. You can read it here.

2021 was a landmark year for Alic—she married her partner (Ryan Hahn, of the indie band Local Natives), and sold her short story collection, Bad Thoughts, to Knopf, in a two-book deal (her second book, a novel, is slated for release in 2023). The title Bad Thoughts stems from the eponymous Instagram series Alic created in 2020 during quarantine, wherein she posted bimonthly lists of Tweet-like aphorisms that were at once wildly humorous, razor-sharp, and deeply relatable. The stories in the collection—which will be published in July 2022—are brash and heady, breaking established rules of narrative and form. Like the Instagram series, they’re also delightfully funny. In one, the spirit of an unborn child hovers over the bodies of its future parents, willing them to copulate and bring it into embodied existence. In another, a woman’s musician boyfriend goes on tour, leaving her alone in their home for the first time ever; she proceeds to question all of her life choices and tumble down a frighteningly familiar Internet rabbit hole; chaos and body dysmorphia ensue. Alic is well-versed in the awkward, writing into our most neurotic, shameful habits and thought patterns with an unparalleled acuity.

For Autre, I sat down with Alic in her Mount Washington living room to talk about the holiness of humor, becoming an artist with no formal training, and the archetype of the eternal child-god. We’re real-life friends now—a true privilege!—but sometimes I miss our extremely long emails.  Read more.

Read The First Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' New Serial Novella →

Over the next year, Brad Phillips and Gideon Jacobs are writing a 12-chapter "serial novella" for Autre. It will be written Exquisite Corpse style — they will alternate who writes each month's chapter, and won’t have access to the previous chapter until it has been published. Brad and Gideon have not discussed plot, structure, format, themes, characters, etc, and promise not to do so even once the project is underway. The idea is to react to each other's work, and hope the final Frankensteinian product is something that deserves to exist. If the authors like what they've made when it's done, the editors might publish it as a "zine." Installments will go up on the 15th of every month. Click here to read Chapter 1: G & B.

Mika Rottenberg Presents "Easy Pieces" @ The New Museum In New York

Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings to manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls (NoNoseKnows, 2015) to the millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores (Cosmic Generator, 2017). The exhibition presents several of her recent video installations and kinetic sculptures, and premieres a new video installation, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), that explores ancient and new ideas about materialism and considers how humans both comprise and manipulate matter. Together, the works in the exhibition trace central themes in Rottenberg’s oeuvre, including labor, technology, distance, energy, and the interconnectedness of the mechanical and the corporeal. Easy Pieces is on view through September 15 at the New Museum 235 Bowery, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery


Watch The Online Premiere of Soil: An Exploration Of Manipulation, Dependency, and Objectification

Soil is the debut film by Mathilde Huron & Julian Feeld. It was shot on Fuji Super 16mm film in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of Southern France and scored by Pontus Berghe, ex-member of Thieves Like Us and current member of Thunder Tillman, with featured actors Joe Rezwin, Liza Journo & Sati Leonne Faulks.

A young filmmaker with mixed intentions sets out to document the friendship between a fifteen-year-old Parisian girl and a homeless alcoholic on the verge of death. Between documentary and fiction, Soil is an exploration of manipulation, dependency, and objectification. This experimental psycho-thriller — a mix of documentary and fiction — was screened in Paris, Tokyo and Los Angeles. 

Courageous Writing For IRL Cowards: Novelist Matt Binder Chats With Novelist Clancy Martin On Making Bad Decisions and The Thin Veil of Fiction →

In 2012, shortly before I lost my mind and committed myself to writing fiction, I was sitting at a pal’s apartment in San Diego, waiting on him to shower and ready himself for a night out, when I picked up a copy of the Vice fiction issue. I flipped through the magazine’s pages looking for something of interest. A story titled “Whores I Have Loved” immediately resonated with me. I understood the sentiment completely. I read with ferocious curiosity as the writer sermonized on the dangers of falling in love with prostitutes in locations foreign and remote. Prior to reading the piece, I didn’t think it possible for a work to exist that was so honest, tender, and vulnerable about a subject so fraught with moral pitfalls. Click here to read more. 

Creamed His Corn: Read Luke Goebel's Newest Stream Of Lascivious Consciousness In A Short Story About Desire, Fantasy And Wanting a Bigger Everything →

photograph by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

He was a “he,” which meant the dummie knew already that there was only two things in the world that mattered and he wasn’t either of them. Were, were! There was the online world of instagram photos and sexiness. Everything that was young or female and sexy or famous and rich and arching its back in a photo, which he wasn’t and then there was the physical world of problems, such as taking a shit and what was written on the wall, and having to go upstairs to take a shit because someone was already in the bathroom, which was the janitor, probably, and him being on campus, and him being in his office, and his being on campus, and him being a fuckhead professor, which you shouldn’t and couldn’t really even say as a fuckhead who was a professor. Fuckhead. click here to read the full story