Love Me Tender

by Catherine Texier

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 wealthy, 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.

Genres: Fiction

212 pages, Paperback

Published June 2, 1987

Reviews

[Sara Queiroz]

Pior livro que já li, e eu já li muitos livros miseráveis. Linguagem demasiado labrega para o meu gosto, está tudo mal escrito e não entendi metade da história.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reads like Henry Miller if Miller actually was interested in people. The prose is often feverish, always energetic and nimble, and often beautiful. It does convey an aching sense of hollowness. I wouldn't have thought I's be interested in any more Manhattan stories, but this one was something new.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

WOOLFIAN! no plot just vibes but it worked for me.

[Dara Lebrun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkable how many books are titled 'Love Me Tender.' Probably most are shoddy attempts at erotica, and this vulnerable, poetic novel hovers far above that throng. There's an Anais Nin timbre to Texier's writing, as though NIn were transported in time and space to the East Village of the 1980s, where she would have been (and was) my neighbor in Alphabet City. I never knew her, but I knew about her. She lived a block away. There's something that alive in her words, as though they still describe what's happening. And in Lower Manhattan, in some ways, they are still happening and this book is a happy bridge between now and then...

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

ive been reading this book for the past 4 years. i pick it up, read a chapter, put it down, find it months sometimes years later. i retrace my steps and backtrack through chapters. i feel like i have spent so much time with this book and its characters that they have become my own. a sense of accomplishment in finishing this book today while sitting outside of a campground bathroom in morro bay, beer and sunshine keeping me company while my phone was charging in the bathroom.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I see Manhattan like an ocean liner adrift in the middle of the Atlantic, never reaching its port. The moorings have been cast off. There’s no turning back to dry land. We’re all thrown together on this phantom ship, hallucinating, without connection to the other world. It’s a trip from which we’ll never come back."

Ah. Yes!

[Jai Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

- someone sent it me ages ago and only just started reading. Liking it a lot so far. quirky way of writing. Looking forward to seeing how it develops.