Valencia

'A wonderfully disgusting book ... invigorating' DAZED Best Books for Pride Month 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 '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

'A wonderfully disgusting book ... invigorating' DAZED Best Books for Pride Month 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 '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

A man checks into a hotel in a Mediterranean city on the banks of the Turia. He is far from home. He holds few possessions. Enough clothing for a week, money for drink. A few essential paperbacks, a cigar box of old photographs. He intends to commit suicide. But somewhere along the way he gets lost in the churn of memory. Valencia is an elegiac and hallucinatory meditation on beauty, loss, and how memory is deceitful, even when photographs are involved. The things we carry come from an infinite sadness. That sadness is the death of childhood. _________ Did you ever stumble across a writer who seems to have lived your life and inhabited your dreams, your darkest moods? This happened to me, and I hope it will happen to you as you read through the mesmerizing pages of James Nulick's Valencia ... Nulick has inherited, from Zola, from Celine, from Burroughs maybe, something of the sweetness that lingers when everything extant has died of rot. His book will live forever in the literature of truth and waste. - Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle The prose of Valencia is delicately simple yet densely poetic. Its voice is haunting. I couldn't help being reminded by every line I read in James Nulick's novel of Garcia Lorca's famous "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" and its chilling refrain: At five o'clock in the afternoon. - Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy against the Human Race

A man checks into a hotel in a Mediterranean city on the banks of the Turia. He is far from home. He holds few possessions. Enough clothing for a week, money for drink. A few essential paperbacks, a cigar box of old photographs. He intends to commit suicide. But somewhere along the way he gets lost in the churn of memory. Valencia is an elegiac and hallucinatory meditation on beauty, loss, and how memory is deceitful, even when photographs are involved. The things we carry come from an infinite sadness. That sadness is the death of childhood. _________ Did you ever stumble across a writer who seems to have lived your life and inhabited your dreams, your darkest moods? This happened to me, and I hope it will happen to you as you read through the mesmerizing pages of James Nulick's Valencia ... Nulick has inherited, from Zola, from Celine, from Burroughs maybe, something of the sweetness that lingers when everything extant has died of rot. His book will live forever in the literature of truth and waste. - Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle The prose of Valencia is delicately simple yet densely poetic. Its voice is haunting. I couldn't help being reminded by every line I read in James Nulick's novel of Garcia Lorca's famous "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" and its chilling refrain: At five o'clock in the afternoon. - Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy against the Human Race