Overview

Ruth is lost. She is living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers’ secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it - until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace. Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves - through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favours; a philosophising suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . . A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.

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9780374613891

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Reviews

Advance Praise ""A knockout . . . Newell writes about sex work and drugs and what people--some people--used to call the demimonde without moralizing or reducing her characters to grim allegories. This book is, among other things, funny and sometimes very sweet, and Newell gives shape to Ruth's chaotic life with gorgeously precise prose . . . Real and raw and exquisitely well crafted."" --Kirkus Reviews [starred] ""A crackerjack novel of a sex worker who comes undone after her ex-boyfriend's disappearance . . . The wild ride is bolstered by striking prose and memorable imagery. It's a stellar entry in the literature of unhinged women, up there with Mona Awad's Bunny."" --Publishers Weekly [starred] ""Haunting and vivid, an excellent surprise"" --Charlotte Shane, The Millions ""Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure, a love story stuffed inside a wadded nylon stocking. It's a novel that wants to get close to you. It wants to bite your neck; it's the actual promise of a hickey. I can't remember the last book I read that was even half as tender. I ate it up."" --Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things ""Soft Core is not just a book but a fully realized and highly seductive way of life--louche, fleshy, and freestyle. Brittany Newell, a hoarder of details and perfumer of moods, has written an existential dual-mystery that's as carefully structured as it is emotionally urgent, like a ransom note in sonnet form. Deeply impressive and fun as hell!"" --Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection ""Brittany Newell's prose is too elegant to be called raw, but the oomph, the heart, makes everything feel so real. I love this world and this narrator, the risks she takes, the story she tells, simple yet so seductive and just teeming with aliveness."" --Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave ""Soft Core drew me in like a whirlpool--a wild spin into loneliness and desire."" --Nicola Dinan, author of Bellies

"Advance Praise ""Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure, a love story stuffed inside a wadded nylon stocking. It's a novel that wants to get close to you. It wants to bite your neck; it's the actual promise of a hickey. I can't remember the last book I read that was even half as tender. I ate it up."" --KRISTEN ARNETT, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things"

Author Information

Brittany Newell is a writer and performer whose work has been published in Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Joyland, Dazed, and Playgirl. She published her debut novel, Oola, at the age of twenty-one. She lives in San Francisco, where she works as a professional dominatrix.

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