Basic Books Valencia

An anarchic and unflinching cult novel “charged with reflection, anger, and the feeling of being alive” (Village Voice), tracing a year of love and lust in San Francisco’s lesbian underground, with a new foreword by Maggie NelsonValencia is a fast-paced account of one girl’s search for love and high times in the dyke world of 1990s San Francisco. Fleeing Tucson and her rotten (ex) girlfriend, Michelle lands in the Mission District, where queers from all over the country are arriving in search of themselves and each other. An aspiring poet, she hurls herself into the city’s riotous underbelly, stumbling through nightlife and open mics, drug adventures, and a string of hookups, breakups, and makeups. As butches and besties spin in and out of Michelle’s orbit, she ponders the powerful force and casual cruelty of their desires, and of her own—all in a singular, biting, deadpan voice shot through with humor and heartbreak. Heady, beer sticky, and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone. Now with a new foreword from Maggie Nelson, this lesbian cult classic is ripe for rediscovery.