Stunning Claudine and gloomy Pauline pretend to be one person so that Claudine can be famous, but just as things take off, Claudine commits suicide. Pauline hatches a new scheme, taking on her dead sister's identity, inhabiting her apartment, and reading her emails-slowly realizing the cost of femininity is to dazzle on the outside while rotting on the inside.
"Virginie Despentes had me in a headlock the whole time I was reading: she's a feminist Zola for the twenty-first century."
Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City
"Pretty Things is the type of rare, enticing book you devour in a fever. Effortlessly cool and slyly spiky, Despentes probes the dynamics of fame, beauty, and female competition, putting her finger on the pulse of what it's like to wear the daily drag of femininity-and then pressing down, slowly and calmly, right where it hurts."
Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
"An intoxicating pop-trash plot of stolen identity that reveals the brutal and hilarious rules of gender-the high-octane philosophy beach read of the summer."
Joanna Walsh, author of Worlds from the Word's End
