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Violent Femmes: Must-Read Books by Women That Foreground Brutal Beauty

A new wave of authors is mining the territory between brilliance and ugliness to produce some of the most adventurous and emotionally unsparing literature being written today.

I've recently been reading more books by women authors, particularly writers who mine a dark seam between the pained confessional and body horror, sparking reflections on sex, art and death, and all the dirty, gritty places in between. It has been a great journey getting away from myself and reading out of my comfort zone into strange new places.

The tone of these books is often framed as decadent but also maintains a contemporary edge, between carnal desire and the need for mutilation of the self and others. These characters are often their own worst enemy—unreliable narrators who struggle in and out of positions of victimhood, they offer honest and very real reflections of the challenge of modern relationships of abuse traded on both sides. What makes these books such an invigorating read is their enthusiasm to show women as flawed, exploited and often ungovernable beings, meeting with various forms of resistance as they try to live within their own agency.

If this all sounds very dark, it's because it is, but these books are sustained by great wit and insight on complications of the flesh and moments of love and obligation strained to the breaking point, seeing the brilliance in ugliness and the decay of beauty as a new kind of truth.

The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment by Philippa Snow

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone

Deliver Me by Elle Nash

The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer

The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel

There is much to love in poet, artist and critic Regel's first novel. The prose is really assured as she takes you beyond the clichéd world of the struggling young artist trying to make it in 21st-century London—an increasingly squeezed space compounding pressures of finance, fleeting tastes and the top-down force of nepotism and good connections.An editor of the art journal SALT, Regel sends up art world schtick with great aplomb, skewering its myriad vanities but also exposes the driven egos of the artists all trying to be heard, known or "discovered." Her increasingly wayward protagonist latches onto a bundle of........

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