Tender is the Flesh, Chapter 48: ---

Chapter 48 of *Tender is the Flesh* is not a chapter. It's the publisher's backlist — a curated selection of other titles you might enjoy, served immediately after a novel about the industrialized consumption of human beings. Bazterrica's book ends with its reader implicated, gutted, holding the weight of what complicity means. And then the very next page asks you to keep shopping. The book doesn't need to satirize consumer capitalism; the book-as-object does it automatically. Every novel has this paratext, but most novels aren't about how systems of consumption naturalize themselves. Here, the catalog page becomes the most accidentally devastating page in the entire work — proof that the machinery the novel describes doesn't stop at the last sentence. It extends to the thing in your hands.