by Michelle Tea
Amethyst Editions
9/13/2016, paperback
SKU: 9781558619395
Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs and alcohol, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south to LA But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.
While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a meta-textual exploration to complement her vows to embrace maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive impulses, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she'll have to compromise her artistic process if she's going to properly ride out doomsday.
Reviews:
"A Gen-X queer girl's version of the bohemian counter-canon." -- New York Times
"Gliding deftly through issues of addiction and recovery, erasure and assimilation, environmental devastation and mass delusion about our own pernicious tendencies, this is a genre- and reality-bending story of quiet triumph for the perennial screw-up and unabashed outsider. A biting, sagacious, and delightfully dark metaliterary novel about finding your way in a world on fire." -- Kirkus (starred review)
"It's this rawness that makes Black Wave so disarming, a rollicking hallucinatory fantasy that's as sobering as cold air... It's sentimental and reckless and not quite like anything I've read before. An apocalypse novel that makes you feel hopeful about the world: could anything be more timely?" -- The Guardian
"The prose is fucking gorgeous, the characters are hilarious and upsetting and miserable, the world is heart-stopping in its strangeness and bleak crawl to the edge of the cliff, then its tumble over the edge." -- Tor.com
"[L]yrical but blunt, capturing her narrator's duel hopelessness and genuine desire for a life full of love and promise... this book exists in a new kind of literary ecosystem--one that doesn't need to fit neatly into the structures of an older era." -- BUST
About the author:
Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including the cult-classic Valencia and the essay collection Against Memoir. She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, PEN/America, and other institutions. Knocking Myself Up is her latest memoir. Tea's cultural interventions include brainstorming the international phenomenon Drag Queen Story Hour, co-creating the Sister Spit queer literary performance tours, and occupying the role of Founding Director at RADAR Productions, a Bay Area literary organization, for over a decade. She also helmed the imprints Sister Spit Books at City Lights Publishers, and Amethyst Editions at The Feminist Press.