“Hard-Core Romance is a wonderfully creative piece of cultural analysis. Writing from a feminist-sociological perspective, Eva Illouz tells us how Fifty Shades of Grey became an international bestseller by providing fantasy resolutions to real-life female dilemmas, and self-help for the douleurs of contemporary heterosexuality. A most timely intervention.”

Laura Kipnis, author of How to Become a Scandal

“A provocative text in its own right, Hard-Core Romance inventively employs the much-maligned Fifty Shades of a Grey to stage a philosophical and sociological conversation about relationship between fantasy, romance, sexuality, and popular literature.  In a modern era where competing desires for autonomy and attachment in sexual relationships are lived realities but seldom theorized, Illouz bravely takes on the novel’s controversial sexual practices, finding in them a meditation on the anxieties and compromises that characterize heterosexual intimacy. This generous and original reading offers the tantalizing prospect that it will unveil the uncertainties and indeterminacies that inhere in the heterosexual compact—a promise that Hard-Core Romance masterfully delivers.”

Suzanne Leonard, author of Fatal Attraction

“[C]ompellingly audacious.”

Times Higher Education

“[T]he first serious, book-length academic analysis of the Fifty Shades of Grey.”

The Millions

“Illouz rightly tags the trilogy a species of self-help."

New Republic

“A reasoned, thoughtful examination of gender relations, women’s desires, and the role of passion in contemporary society. . . . Vital and interesting.”

Jessa Crispin | Los Angeles Review of Books