Valencia

The 25th anniversary edition of Michelle Tea's classic coming-of-age story, now with a foreword by Maggie Nelson, award-winning author of The Argonauts.

"Hilarious, euphoric, perspicacious and punk — the book that showed so many of us how writing can be real" — Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

"One of the few truly life changing books I've encountered" — Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby

Fleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco's riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone.

"If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl, you'll scarf Valencia right up" — Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

"Michelle Tea is an intoxicating writer, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch" — Guardian