Constance Debré
Constance Debré
Tuesday, March 31
Doors: 7pm
Reading: 7:30pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives
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The Poetic Research Bureau hosts a reading and book launch for Constance Debré's Offenses, out this month on Semiotext(e) press. Curator and writer Fiona Alison Duncan will join Constance in a Q&A after the reading.
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Since publishing her first novel in 2018, Constance Debré’s work has exposed the flaws in the social order with dizzying passion and intelligence. Her first-person trilogy—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name—describes the trajectory of leaving a comfortable bourgeois life as mother and wife employed as a criminal justice attorney to become a writer and lesbian. Her books radically challenge all received ideas of the couple, motherhood, family, and inheritance.
In Offenses, Debré trains her sights on a single case of inevitably flawed justice that, like hundreds of others like it, reveals the enmeshed culpabilities of the perpetrator, the victim, the place, and the past. In a housing project adjacent to Paris, an unemployed teenager kills his elderly neighbor in order to pay off a drug debt of €450. Writing with impassioned detachment, Debré uses forensic detail to explore the ambient senselessness behind this senseless crime.
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Fiona Alison Duncan is an author, curator, and the founding host of Hard to Read, a literary social practice. Her books include Ex-Best Friends (2025), Pippa Garner: Act Like You Know Me (2023), and Exquisite Mariposa (2019), winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. Duncan is a founding member of the Estate of Pippa Garner.
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This event is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.