Valencia

by Michelle Tea

Overview

Valencia is the fast-paced account of one girl's search for love and high times in the drama-filled dyke world of San Francisco's Mission District. Michelle Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex; Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend; Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama; and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580052382
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	04/15/2008
Series:	Live Girls
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.45(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including Modern Tarot, Knocking Myself Up, and Against Memoir. She is the founder and former executive director of the literary nonprofit RADAR Productions, where she pioneered the first Drag Queen Story Hour. Valencia received the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction and was adapted into a feature film.

What People are Saying About This

Beth Barnes

…the novel unfolds itself as a lyrical poem, a story that evokes a visceral, emotional response….the characters are detailed and richly realized, even in the most fleeting of mentions.

Editorial Reviews

An easy and amusing read, this book dashes the straight girls' myth that "everything would be so much easier if only I were gay."

BUST Magazine

A missive sent straight from the mayhem.”—Maggie Nelson, from the foreword

“If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl you’ll scarf Valencia right up. There’s so much colliding and ‘sharing.’ I mean in the good way—sharing bodies, drugs, stories and clothes. The street today is full of girls if you haven’t noticed.”—Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

“Valencia is one of the few true life-changer books I’ve encountered. One of those books that gets casually slipped to you, and then, a couple hours later, you understand you’ve been living all wrong, that everything must change. I wish you luck in the aftermath of reading it!”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition Baby

“I consider Michelle Tea a literary MOTHER—champion, organizer, and co-conspirator of the most potent alt-literature scenes San Francisco has witnessed in decades. I will forever tip my hat to her and the timeless and immortal text that is Valencia.”—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

“Wonderful storytelling...charged with reflection, anger, and the feeling of being alive.”—The Village Voice

“A spidery roman á clef for our times...Valencia crackles with take-no-prisoners prose.”—The Seattle Times

“There is immediacy in the stream-of-consciousness style, as if Tea were in the room offering the reader a late-night confession.”—Library Journal

“An edgy, supercharged, supersurreal reality.”—Booklist

“Michelle Tea is the Mission’s poet laureate. She gives us our voice back with tragic porno hilarity at breakneck speeds, our own personal Bill Moyers documenting dramas of queer punk lives.”—Lynn Breedlove, spoken word artist and singer for Tribe 8

“Tea’s fiction is beautifully similar to real life—a glimpse into a bad girl’s diary—full of misguided intelligence, complicated sex, and the impossibility, even the undesirability, of redemption.”—Tracy Vogel, The Stranger

“What’s truly inspired in this book is Tea’s literary voice, an effortlessly controlled combination of ironic wit and romantic longing.”—The Bay Guardian

“The stream-of-consciousness narration is a delightful ride to be on, shifting us into other registers of memory and relationship.”—Rain Taxi

“Tea’s exquisite writing performs the miracle, dancing along a razor’s edge between humor and pathos, jaded exhaustion and wonder. In lesser hands, this material would simply be sad. As it is, it’s transcendental.”—Girlfriends magazine

From the Publisher