Valencia

“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