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.
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“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, author of She Wants It
“A biting, sagacious, and delightfully dark metaliterary novel about finding your way in a world on fire.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“In Tea’s hands, sobriety, love, and something like happiness are stranger and more unsettling than bohemian decadence could ever hope to be…Black Wave retains the off-kilter realism of the best apocalyptic writing: The nightmare is like our world, only a little more so.”
— New York Times Book Review“Tea paints a terrific portrait, but her great gift is how she makes readers look more closely at themselves.”
— Library Journal“A love letter to literature’s lasting power and the ability of writing to save one’s future…If the world is going to end, then Tea’s way out isn’t so bad.”
— San Francisco Chronicle“Black Wave is a rollicking triumph.”
— Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts“Black Wave amps [Michelle’s] uniquely seductive whirl of ugliness, hilarity, and brainy, sexy, revelry to produce a work with the centripetal pull of a maelstrom.”
— Heidi Julavits, The Uses of Enchantment“A radically honest and scary book. And trust me, it’s a bloody and wonderful place Michelle has spun, fantastic, dark, and entirely awake.”
— Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls“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 PiratesBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including the cult-classic Valencia, the illustrated Rent Girl, and the speculative memoir Black Wave. She has received awards from the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, PEN/America, and other institutions.