Catherine Texier - Love me tender

LOVE ME TENDER

Lulu, the heroine of this urgent novel, is a young French dancer who works in a downtown strip joint, the Blue Night Lounge. She inhabits a New York world where new, uncompromising styles of love, art, and experience are being born. Lulu wends her way from Julian, a junkie poet, to Henry, a priapic Tribeca painter, to the local Puerto Rican boy, Mario. She shares her memories of a confused childhood in France with an older French woman and casts a cool, yet passionately observant eye on her adopted city.
Written with immediacy and raw intensity, Love Me Tender is an authentic, sometimes shocking, always original slice of urban life, by an author with talent to burn.

Excerpted reviews :

“I enjoyed every word… One of the many things about this book that is so great is that Ms. Texier…. Writes in such a way as to allow us to experience the struggle for love and the uselessness of living without it.” Hubert Selby, Jr.

“Sexy… poignant… at times rough, at times even bad… Love Me Tender is a female story of New York City. But most of all, this book is a personal song… A welcome antidote to the more trendy and less gutsy and heartfelt accounts of New York City downtown life.” Kathy Acker.

“A strange, haunting novel that both seduces and spurns… The story of Lulu, a 25 year old French dancer, and her sexual wanderings across Manhattan is a cinematic rendering, highly reminiscent of the nouvelle vague of French film making: alienated, moody, intellectual and sexy…. Catherine Texier combines in one woman questing intellect and guiltless passion.”
The New York Times Book Review

“Extraordinary… An explicit look at sex and survival on the Lower East Side. [Love Me Tender] is full of powerful, sensuous language.”
The New York Times Magazine

1/3

Excerpted reviews:

“Somewhere between a Henry Miller fantasy and a William Burroughs nightmare… Texier’s prose reads like a brilliant translation from the French.” James Atlas, Vanity Fair.

“Love Me Tender [is] a novel made up of equal parts Kerouac and Proust… The author is a restrained, even delicate writer with an unusual ability to delineate sensory impressions and psychological states with a few deft strokes.” The Village Voice.

“Catherine Texier has written a splendid, unsentimental, erotic and risky novel.” Details

“Those open to literary experiment will enjoy Texier’s linguistic fireworks and her dead-on depiction of souls adrift in the urban jungle of the 80’s” Kirkus Review

“This is a deeply disturbing novel of colours and smells and textures… maybe it should carry a government health warning.” Books (London)

“Both fascinating and frightening in its eroticism.” American Book Review

2/3

Excerpted reviews:

“A novel written with passion and candour.” City Limits (London)

“Henry Miller rewritten by a woman in the 80’s.” Sunday Independent (London)

“Every glossy lady should keep this one is reserve; a teasing cocktail of fusing style nuances spiked with deadly nightshade, i.e. uncompromising guiltlessness.” City Life (London)

“The writing is brisk and precise, and full of memorable images.” Time Out (London)

“Both fascinating and frightening in its eroticism.” American Book Review

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3/3