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
Sales rank:	633,477
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.45(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

Michelle Tea is the author of five memoirs: The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, Valencia (now a film), The Chelsea Whistle (Seal Press), Rent Girl and How to Grow Up (Penguin/Plume), with Amazon Studios. Her novels include Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, part of a Young Adult fantasy trilogy published by McSweeneys, and Rose of No Man's Land. Black Wave is a dystopic memoir-fiction hybrid. Forthcoming works include Castle on the River Vistula, the final installment of the YA series, and Modern Tarot, a tarot how-to and spell book published by Harper Elixir.

Tea is the curator of the Amethyst Editions imprint at Feminist Press. She founded the literary nonprofit RADAR Productions and the international Sister Spit performance tours, and is the former editor of Sister Spit Books, an imprint of City Lights. She created Mutha Magazine, an online publication about real-life parenting. Her writing has appeared in Harper's, Cosmopolitan, the Believer, Marie Claire, n+1, xoJane, California Sunday Magazine, Buzzfeed, and many other print and web publications.

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

Tea, a modern-day Beat, is also a kind of pop ambassador to the world of the tattooed, pierced, politicized and sex-radical queer-grrls of San Francisco. Her second novel (after The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America) dramatizes the hopes and hurts, apathies and ambitions of young lesbians looking for love in the Mission District, focusing on Michelle, a poet navigating the druggy, boozy dyke scene while consorting with a series of wacky lady loves. Among these are Petra, who thrills Michelle by brandishing a knife and being bossy in bed; Willa, a depressive who won't take off her clothes even in the heat of passion; Iris, originally from Georgia; and Scrumptious, who Michelle falls for before she realizes she's the type of girl who wears corny "freedom rings" and white jeans. While the trivialities of these courtships are entertaining and the book is far more coherent than the author's first novel, Tea hasn't entirely figured out how to make her characters come to life beyond predictable bounds. Organized as a series of loosely linked character profiles, the book self-consciously relies on the hipster grooviness and inside jokes of S.F. culture to energize the narrative. And although Tea's writing is consistently uncommon and textured -- "the mushrooms tasted like a trunk of moth-eaten clothes and after we ate them we went out to the stoop and waited for the world to turn weird"--folks waiting for the truly weird, breakthrough novel in downtown alt-chick literature will be disappointed by this sometimes-superficial, stylized entry. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The eponymous lesbian heroine of Tea's Valencia lives in a dirty San Franciscan haze of cigarettes, cheap beer, hip fashion, and girlfriend after girlfriend. As she moves from one confused affair to the next, she drifts from job to job and passion to passion. In this continuation of Tea's The Passionate Mistakes and the Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America (Semiotext(e), 1999), the twentysomething characters desperately search for love and usually find only an unrequited crush or hollow sex. There's no real plot here, but there is immediacy in the stream-of-consciousness style, as if Tea were in the room offering the reader a late-night confession. Recommended for those seeking a glimpse into the angst of a dramatically self-absorbed if ultimately aimless youth culture.--Devon C. Thomas, Hass Assocs., Ann Arbor, MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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