A daring novel that made Christine Angot one of the most controversial figures in contemporary France recounts the narrator's incestuous relationship with her father. Tess Lewis's forceful translation brings into English this audacious novel of taboo. The narrator is falling out from a torrential relationship with another woman. Delirious with love and yearning, her thoughts grow increasingly cyclical and wild, until exposing the trauma lying behind her pain. With the intimacy offered by a confession, the narrator embarks on a psychoanalysis of herself, giving the reader entry into her tangled experiences with homosexuality, paranoia, and, at the core of it all, incest. In a masterful translation from the French by Tess Lewis, Christine Angot's Incest audaciously confronts its readers with one of our greatest taboos. 2018 Prix Albertine finalist "A sensation in France, [INCEST is a] novel in the form of a wild confession of a life filled with trauma..."  —  The New York Times "Written in emotional, stream-of-consciousness prose,  Incest  can often feel agitated and erratic, perfectly capturing the shattered inner world of its narrator, who is suggested throughout to be the author herself. . .  Incest  challenges, disgusts and confounds, making it a moving and memorable contribution to contemporary literature. Angot's work of auto-fiction confronts the brutality and pervasiveness of desire and will appeal to those both fascinated and terrified by explorations into the darkness of human nature." — Shelf Awareness "Angot is being most truthful when she is discussing her choices as a writer. On one level, I see this book as a treatise on writing itself." —Electric Literature "At times reminiscent of playwright Sarah Kane, particularly in her incantatory free associations ...  Incest  is remarkably prescient. Christine Angot pinpoints how technology antagonizes mental health; how a lack of immediate reply can give the obsessive mind no room to breath." — Rebecca Watson,  The Times Literary Supplement "Given Angot’s antagonism toward conventional syntax, the English translation, by Tess Lewis, is a feat of perspicuity. . . When “L’Inceste” was first published, an interviewer asked Angot what she hoped to achieve. “My ambition is to be unmanageable,” she said. “That people swallow me and at the same time cannot digest me.”" — New Yorker "Angot’s writing reclaims the confession as a radical act—spiritual, even...At its core,  Incest  is a true testament to the subversive power of literature."  — Elizabeth Baird,  The Millions "A 2013  Telegraph  article labelled Angot as 'France’s Queen of Shock-Fiction.' This seems to imply that there’s something inauthentic about Angot. But there’s nothing inauthentic about the way she examines incest’s effect on her character’s cognition, or her ability to derive meaning and draw connections from even the most horrific of personal experiences."    —Rebecca Rand,  ZYZZVA "Angot works the spirit over. One is exhausted, but one also cries,  Finally, an authentic experience ! Rude and raw, artful but brash and unpredictable...This is what we might all hope to write, to make, to communicate. This should be everyone’s letter to the world. Let us hope more of Angot’s work reaches the English-speaking world, and soon."  --David Pratt, Lambda Literary "[INCEST] creates a space where imagination, potential futures, and pasts mingle with experiences, where the ‘I’ slips from the author to the narrator and gets lost in the vortex of language; it is language that speaks—the writer just writes... Voices echoing from the fractures, this is  Incest : a collective adventure for the one that writes and the ones that read." — Giorgos Kassiteridis,  Asymptote "[ Incest ] is rich, intimate, and pulls you in... [Angot's] books are an incantation, biblical in their onrush of verbs, nouns, names, and deliberate repetitions in the service of rhythm and camouflage, compelling you to read on, for sound, for cadence, for poetry... Take  Incest  into your arms and let yourself experience Angot as you would music, or an image of great evocative power." —Tsipi Keller,  Asymptote Journal "[A] brilliant portrait of a brain almost continually on fire with self-loathing... both a mesmerizing and harrowing ride... I believe Angot has done something truly spectacular here... How many of us have been lost in darkness and unable to think our way out of it? Angot’s life is lived in that state—a state of perpetual chaos and dejection. And she has used her brazen, fierce intelligence to translate this reality to the page in a way that reveals her brilliance as a writer and her sadness as a human being. Her journey is one you will never forget." —Elaine Margolin,  Truth Dig "The exquisite frenzy of the novel is captured masterfully in Tess Lewis’ translation, which preserves not just the passion and the mania of Angot’s narrator, but her wit and her wordplay as well. Lewis has mana