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How long does it take to read King Kong Theory?

Virginie Despentes

King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes takes about 2 hours 55 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 2 hours 55 minutes

An evening's read

First published 2006. 159 pages, about 43,725 words.

6 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 4 hours 52 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 2 hours 55 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 1 hour 49 minutes

The page count is the median across 21 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Out of print in the U.S. for far too long, writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s autobiographical feminist manifesto is back―in an improved English translation―“blistering with anger, and so precisely phrased that it feels an injustice to summarize it” (Nadja Spiegelman, New York Review of Books). I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh. And if I’m starting here it’s because I want to be crystal clear: I’m not here to make excuses, I’m not here to bitch. I wouldn’t swap places with anyone because being Virginie Despentes seems to me a more interesting gig than anything else out there. Powerful, provocative, and personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-Moi and Vernon Subutex came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes about sex and gender. An autobiography, a call for revolt, a manifesto for a new punk feminism, King Kong Theory is Despentes’s most beloved and reviled work, and is here made available again in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.

Subjects: Biographies, Écrivaines françaises, French Authors, Biography, Feminism, Sociology

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