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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.
"Entrancing ... Scott's addictive narrative offers a kaleidoscopic look at a lively milieu and a woman's struggle to overcome heartbreak and obsession, and make a life for herself as an artist. Readers will be thrilled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The literary queen of the Paris techno scene, whose cult novel Superstars immortalized the hedonism and rivalry of the sweat-drenched dancefloors and rave parties of 1990s France ... Scott's writing contrasts beautiful party people with the fragility of life, the difficulty of being part of a crowd." —The Guardian
"The iconic Ann Scott chronicles the Paris lesbian techno scene of the '90s with language as rhythmic and hypnotic as trance music itself, reveling in the debauchery and beauty, the hard drugs and rough sex. This is a wildly ecstatic novel, as the heavens open up for our heroine Louise, but only because she dances with the devils. Brilliant, relentless, and wild as fuck." —Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker
This information about Superstars was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ann Scott is the author of ten novels. Her most recent novel, Les Insolents, won the 2023 Prix Renaudot in France.
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