Soft Core
A Novel
by Brittany Newell
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Pub Date Feb 04 2025 | Archive Date Mar 04 2025
Description
“Vivid . . . Exhilarating . . . Soft Core is pacey and rich, full of verve, drama and detail.” —The New York Times Book Review
A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.
Ruth is lost. She’s 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 favors; a philosophizing 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.
A Note From the Publisher
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.
Advance Praise
“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
“Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a cotton candy nightmare, 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. Soft Core is a slippery, captivating pleasure. I ate it up.” —Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
“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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374613891 |
| PRICE | $28.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 352 |
Available on NetGalley
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