Jonathan Woollen — SUPERSTARS - with Lily Meyer

One of the premier French cult novels of the last thirty years, a tender and combative portrait of Paris’s queer rave scene in the 90s — for fans of Virginie Despentes and Gary Indiana.Louise is a woman in her early thirties with a record contract, colorful roommates, and a passionate, volatile relationship with the lesbian community around her. She used to be part of the French rock scene, having dated and collaborated with a man named Nikki who was a crucial figure in that milieu. But she has been out of that world for years, having switched from rock to rave culture and, concurrently, having started to date chiefly women. Her longest and most combative relationship in this scene has been with Alex, another woman who has established herself as a DJ and has recently started seeing a much younger woman named Inès.    One day, Louise receives a life-changing advance from a record label to produce her own electronic music. She struggles to handle the responsibility of professionalizing her lifestyle, one suffused with the omnidirectional drama of the women in her circle, and with her own equivocations about her role in it. They bar-crawl, watch MTV, go to each other’s sets, hook up, and do copious drugs.    Tension builds as Louise finds herself pulled toward multiple possible paths: forward in her career in the techno world; backward toward rock’n’roll, Nikki, and the life he represents; toward Alex again; and toward Inès, leading to a dangerous and ultimately devastating affair. Ann Scott portrays the Paris underground in all its beauty, ugliness, and pulpy grandeur, with the caustic voice of a born punk struggling to conform to the standards of a new, hungry world of anticonformists. Jonathan Woollen, translator of SUPERSTARS, is a French-to-English translator originally from North Carolina, currently based in Queens, NY and working in publishing. He previously led the in-store author event program at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC and served as music director of the radio station WXYC-Chapel Hill. His work has appeared in outlets including Electric Literature and Asymptote. Superstars is his first published book-length translation. Woollen will be in conversation with Lily Meyer, a translator, a critic, and the author of the novel Short War. She is also a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781662603471?ic_referral=GqB_WqRU2BS4sMU4xebeM-Qq-7Cb4J4SeMBAEnVgd4UwMxThvwwPsDAkEgDv9jZkq_hpaFJoxNyEejKnu6dPcKOQvi2DH3HH7pruJBEQguqp3_e0cHJFv2lY2Pw9CJ0sH6Elu_o