conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Therese and Isabelle about Therese, Isabelle, French-language with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary
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conversations.value: "Therese and Isabelle is written with unflinching sincerity and the author's progressive attitude and experimental style confirm it as one of the greatest examples of French-language erotic literature." Olivia Heal, TLS "But if the uncensored Therese and Isabelle reads like a fever-dream, to many it represents a long-awaited panacea." Thea Lenarduzzi, Literary Review "So here we have extraordinary writing about sex; and, more importantly, about love, and the way it makes us feel." Nicholas Lezard, Guardian "Thunderbolts of illicit love. A classy new translation of the author's masterpiece on the tyranny of love." Independent "Reading the author is like discovering a whole new nervous system." Observer "Violette's prose, hirsute and grating as always, throws itself into faces more spiritedly than today's provocateurs, and above all more authentically. The reticence and languor of Therese and Isabelle renews an erotic tradition that today has become banal." Liberation "Perhaps her most sulphurous novel. But who's better at describing the first innocence of desire, the beauty of clandestine and shared love, the force of female tenderness?" Matricule des Anges "This unabridged version restores, breathless, the intimate crescendo of an erotic journey, the murmur of each emotion. A woman's body discovers sensuality under the pen of a writer who's given her flesh to her writing." Magazine Litteraire
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Deborah, Levy, Lesbian, lifted.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "Therese and Isabelle is written with unflinching sincerity and the author's progressive attitude and experimental style confirm it as one of the greatest examples of French-language erotic literature. " Olivia Heal, TLS "But if the uncensored Therese and Isabelle reads like a fever-dream, to many it represents a long-awaited panacea. " Thea Lenarduzzi, Literary Review "So here we have extraordinary writing about sex; and, more importantly, about love, and the way it makes us feel. " Nicholas Lezard, Guardian "Thunderbolts of illicit love. A classy new translation of the author's masterpiece on the tyranny of love. " Independent "Reading the author is like discovering a whole new nervous system. " Deborah Levy "Lesbian story ban is lifted. " Observer "Violette's prose, hirsute and grating as always, throws itself into faces more spiritedly than today's provocateurs, and above all more authentically. The reticence and languor of Therese and Isabelle renews an erotic tradition that today has become banal. " Liberation "Perhaps her most sulphurous novel. But who's better at describing the first innocence of desire, the beauty of clandestine and shared love, the force of female tenderness?" Matricule des Anges "This unabridged version restores, breathless, the intimate crescendo of an erotic journey, the murmur of each emotion. A woman's body discovers sensuality under the pen of a writer who's given her flesh to her writing. " Magazine Litteraire
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conversations.value: the first three paragraphs for this book
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conversations.value: Therese and Isabelle
  It is the privilege of great artists to be ahead of their times. It is the lot of "accursed" ones to expect posthumous recognition. This is all the more true for women. Virginia Woolf foresaw Leduc's position, asserting that if a woman were to write accurately and precisely about her feelings, she would find no man—that is, no one at all—to publish her.
  The list of early admirers of Violette Leduc is literarily impressive: de Beauvoir, Cocteau, Sartre, Genet, Camus, and Jouhandeau. In a letter Simone de Beauvoir wrote to her American lover, Nelson Algren, on June 28, 1947, de Beauvoir recounts having dinner with Violette Leduc, whom she describes as "the most interesting woman I know" (Beauvoir 1998, 37). High praise indeed, from someone like de Beauvoir. She is perhaps fascinated that someone from such an underprivileged background, someone with the odd and difficult personality that was Leduc's, could produce such astonishing writing, breaking new ground in the description of women's lives and of female sexuality in particular.
  Yet for Leduc, being recognized by this elite subset didn't constitute a fully satisfying form of success—in part because she was poor and desperate to earn money from her writing, in part because she hungered for wider recognition.
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conversations.value: another paragraph
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conversations.value: The letter is typical of Leduc in all her idiosyncrasy: verging here and there toward the preposterous without ever quite tipping over into it, excessive in its emotivity, self-consciously obsessive, and profoundly curious both about the way sexuality functions (which doesn't mean she can't make the odd homophobic remark), and about the lack of fit between her sexuality and everyone else's (in this case, de Beauvoir's, the two women she describes, and lesbians who frequent queer bars and cabarets). She is attentive to a number of characteristics, axes of variations in sexualities we might say, that aren't always factored into typical discussions of sexuality: that sexualities have a class or regional component; that age difference is important in some sexualities; that girth can have a relation to gender and to sexuality; that sexualities such as her own and that of this couple of women are often best understood by way of representations from the world of literature (Genet's two maids), and that the representations chosen can sometimes rely on transgendered forms of identification (her link to Proust's character, Charlus).
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conversations.value: the last paragraph
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conversations.value: With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words "more King Kong than Kate Moss"—delivers a highly charged account of women's lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender, and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she creates a new space for all those who can't or won't obey the rules.