When Pauline Harmange, a French writer and aspiring novelist, published a treatise on hating men, she expected it to sell at the most a couple of hundred copies among friends and readers of her blog, reports The Guardian.
Instead, a threat by a government official to take legal action to ban Moi les hommes, je les déteste ('I Hate Men') has made it a sellout. The first 450-copy print run was quickly snapped up, as was the following two reprints. Now 2,500 copies have been sold.
The publisher, Monstrograph, described as a “micropublishing house” run by volunteers, is overwhelmed and says I Hate Men will not be reprinted again unless a bigger publisher comes to the rescue.
Harmange, 25, is a mix of bemused and shell-shocked to find herself in the middle of a literary and political storm. “I didn’t expect this. It’s been an enormous surprise,” she told the Guardian from her home in Lille, northern France, where she lives with her husband, Mathieu, 29, and Eleven the cat. “It’s the first time I’ve had a book come out. I wrote a novel but it was never published.”
Harmange said she was asked to write I Hate Men after someone spotted a blog she had written on misandry, or man-hating.