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Published Sep 2016
320 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A dreamlike, dystopian meditation on sobriety, adulthood, and the obligations of storytelling.
It's 1999 - and Michelle's world is ending.
Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for 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 sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, 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.
"Starred Review. A biting, sagacious, and delightfully dark metaliterary novel about finding your way in a world on fire." - Kirkus
"In Tea's skillfully loose, lusty prose, Michelle is both vulnerable and brash, blitzing through lovers and bags of heroin, terrified but also convinced of her own invincibility... [A]n important portrait of the late '90s." - Publishers Weekly
"I was unable put to Black Wave down, suddenly afraid and unsure of what was out there beyond my reading. This bad fairytale-come-true is destabilizing and palpable, and it's Michelle Tea's most fearless book. It's a radically honest, scary, and wonderful place that Michelle has spun. It shook me up." - Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
"Scary, funny and genre-bending - a mind-blowing meta-poem - Black Wave is Michelle Tea's most ambitious, complex, and imaginative work so far. An investigation of addiction's apocalypse, it's somehow wonderfully strange, daring, and dirty and yet completely universal and true." - Jill Soloway, creator of Transparent
"Listen up: it's the end of the world and Michelle Tea is the best writer to be with. She's got the smarts and the laughs, the sharpness and the love, the grit and the skin and the ink she needs to see us through. I'm sticking with her until there's nothing left." - Daniel Handler, author of We Are Pirates
"I worship at the altar of this book. Somehow Michelle Tea has managed to write a hilarious, scorching, devastatingly observed novel about addiction, sex, identity, the 90s, apocalypse, and autobiography, while also gifting us with an indispensable meditation on what it means to write about those things - indeed, on what it means to write at all" - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
This information about Black Wave was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michelle Tea's memoirs include The Passionate Mistakes, The Chelsea Whistle, Rent Girl, and Valencia, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. Valencia was also made into a feature-length film and toured film festivals globally, and the book was translated into Slovenian, Japanese, and German. She is also the author of the novel Rose of No Man's Land, and editor of anthologies Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache; Without a Net; It's So You; and Baby, Remember My Name. She is also the author of a Young Adult fantasy trilogy being published by McSweeney's. Her most recent book is How to Grow Up, a memoir in essays published by Penguin/Plume.
Michelle was the recipient of an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, a GOLDIE in Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and selected Best Local Writer by both the Guardian and San Francisco Weekly.
Michelle writes for various print and web publications, including The Believer, n+1, Buzzfeed, and xoJane. She is the creator of Mutha Magazine, an online publication about real-life parenting.
In 1994 Michelle Tea created Sister Spit, an all-girl open mic that ran weekly for two years in San Francisco, earning a Best of the Bay Award from The San Francisco Bay Guardian. From 1997 – 1999 Sister Spit toured the United States, bringing an ever-changing roster of female writers and performance artists across the country, including poet Eileen Myles, New York Times Bestselling author Beth Lisick, and transgender author, musician and performance artist Lynn Breedlove. In 2003 Michelle founded RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit organization that oversees a multitude of queer-centric projects.
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