Michelle Tea

Beloved literary iconoclast Michelle Tea reinvents tarot for a new generation in this guide to using the Tarot as a twenty-first-century tool for connecting with our higher selves. Long before Michelle Tea was winning awards for her poignant memoirs, she was a scrappy misfit on the streets of San Francisco, supporting herself by giving eerily prescient tarot readings. As her reputation as a writer grew, she stopped publicly reading the Tarot, though she never stopped doing it privately. Based on over twenty-five years of experience and a deep and abiding love of the cards, Modern Tarot brings the full force of Tea’s unique insight, inviting pop sensibility, and wicked humor to bear on the tradition of the Tarot in a fascinating journey through the cards that teaches us how to use this tradition for radical self-growth. Whether you’re a dyed-in-the-wool seeker or a digital-age skeptic—or a little of both—the power of tarot is open to you. Modern Tarot doesn’t require you to believe in the supernatural or to focus narrowly on using the tarot as a divination tool. Instead, it offers fiercely insightful descriptions of each of the seventy-eight cards in the tarot system (each one fully illustrated by Amanda Verwey) and specially designed rituals to guide readers on a path toward transformative personal growth. Grounded in Tea’s decades of tarot wisdom and personal experience, this is a guide that beginners will fall in love with and experienced readers will learn from anew. With her trademark one-of-a-kind insight and wit, Tea shows how tarot offers moments of deep, authentic connection during a time when “connection” is ubiquitous but rarely delves beneath the surface—and how the affirming and personal nature of the Tarot offers a spiritual experience that is gentle, individual, and aspirational.

Connecting with Your Higher Self through the Wisdom of the Cards

Modern Tarot

As the planet inches toward its decline, a writer deals with the hallucinatory confusion of celebrity, addiction, and climate change.

Black Wave

The rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco's radical lesbian underground is laid bare in this action-packed novel, which follows a young gay woman down into the often dangerous world inhabited by the city's "dyke" community. Original.

Valencia

When Sophie and her friend play the dangerous pass-out game, Sophie has visions of a mermaid who could help her discover her destiny as the girl who brings the magic back to their broken-down town.

Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

The story of a young lesbian's advetures in and out of the sex industry on both the East and West Coasts of America.

Rent Girl

The PEN Award-winning essay collection about queer lives: “Gorgeously punk-rock rebellious.”—The A.V. Club The razor-sharp but damaged Valerie Solanas; a doomed lesbian biker gang; recovering alcoholics; and teenagers barely surviving at an ice creamery: these are some of the larger-than-life, yet all-too-human figures populating America’s fringes. Rife with never-ending fights and failures, theirs are the stories we too often try to forget. But in the process of excavating and documenting these queer lives, Michelle Tea also reveals herself in unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is the first-ever collection of journalistic writing by the author of How to Grow Up and Valencia. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life. “Eclectic and wide-ranging…A palpable pain animates many of these essays, as well as a raucous joy and bright curiosity.” —The New York Times “Queer counterculture beats loud and proud in Tea’s stellar collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred) “The best essay collection I've read in years.”—The New Republic Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms

Against Memoir

From PEN/America Award winner, 2021 Guggenheim fellow, and beloved literary and tarot icon Michelle Tea, the hilarious, powerfully written, taboo-breaking story of her journey to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40 year-old, queer, uninsured woman Written in intimate, gleefully TMI prose, Knocking Myself Up is the irreverent account of Tea's route to parenthood--with a group of ride-or-die friends, a generous drag queen, and a whole lot of can-do pluck. Along the way she falls in love with a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, attempts biohacking herself a baby with black market fertility meds (and magicking herself an offspring with witch-enchanted honey), learns her eggs are busted, and enters the Fertility Industrial Complex in order to carry her younger lover's baby. With the signature sharp wit and wild heart that have made her a favorite to so many readers, Tea guides us through the maze of medical procedures, frustrations and astonishments on the path to getting pregnant, wryly critiquing some of the systems that facilitate that choice ("a great, punk, daredevil thing to do"). In Knocking Myself Up, Tea has crafted a deeply entertaining and profound memoir, a testament to the power of love and family-making, however complex our lives may be, to transform and enrich us.

A Memoir of My (in)Fertility

Knocking Myself Up

Valerie Solanas

SCUM Manifesto

An urgent testament to the trials of life for women living without a financial safety net Indie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts--shares these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can't go home to the suburbs when ends don't meet. When jobs are scarce and the money has dwindled, these writers have nowhere to go but below the poverty line. The writers offer their different stories not for sympathy or sadness, but an unvarnished portrait of how it was, is, and will be for generations of women growing up working class in America. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from selling blood for grocery money to the culture shock of "jumping" class. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Bee Lavender, Eileen Myles, and Daisy Hernández.

The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class

Without a Net

In a collection of essays, the author describes how she started her literary career while living in a dirty communal house in San Francisco, partied with drugs and alcohol, dated men and women simultaneously and worked a series of dead-end jobs. Original.

A Memoir

How to Grow Up

The thrilling finale of the bold and fantastical Chelsea Trilogy finds Sophie Swankowski in an ancient castle in Poland--and at the center of an ages-old battle. Even with her magic powers, can one 13-year-old from Massachusetts really save the world?

Castle on the River Vistula

What it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, edited by cult-favorite author Michelle Tea. SLUTS, the first publication from vulgarian queer publisher DOPAMINE BOOKS, is an exploration of what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture. Featuring personal essays, spilled secrets, fiction, memoir, and experimental works, SLUTS asks writers and readers to investigate the many ways the notion of the slut impacts our inner and outer lives, as a threat or an identity, a punishment or an aspiration, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a philosophy and rallying cry. From hideous and terrifying first encounters to postapocalyptic polyamory, from unionizing sex workers to backstage tableaux of sex and drugs and rock and roll, SLUTS’s stories probe the liberating highs and abject lows of physical abandon. Featuring work from performer Miguel Gutierrez, hailed by the New York Times as “an artist of ordered excess”; former Nylon magazine editor in chief Gabrielle Korn; award-winning author Brontez Purnell; Whore of New York author Liara Roux; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jeremy Atherton Lin; and a host of additional artists and writers, SLUTS reveals the knowledges provoked by a dalliance with desire. With work by BRONTEZ PURNELL * VERA BLOSSOM * MEREDITH MARAN * ROBERT GLÜCK * GABRIELLE KORN * CARLEY MOORE * NATE LIPPENS * CARTA MONIR * DREW ARRIOLA-SANDS * TOM COLE * JENNY FRAN DAVIS * BARUCH PORRAS-HERNANDEZ * KAMALA PULIGANDLA * ANNA JOY SPRINGER * LIARA ROUX * HEDI EL KHOLTI * JEN SILVERMAN * LYDIA CONKLIN * SAM COHEN * CHERYL E. KLEIN * JEREMY ATHERTON LIN * MCKENZIE WARK * DAVIEL SHY * FAWZY TAYLOR * CYRUS DUNHAM * MIGUEL GUTIERREZ * CHLOE CALDWELL * D-L ALVEREZ * AMANDA MONTIEL * LAURIE STONE * RYKA AOKI * VERONICA GONZALEZ PEÑA * TALEEN KALI * NICOLE REED * GRACE LAVERY * CRISTY C. ROAD * & more

An Anthology

SLUTS

It's So You explores the intersection between personal style and personal expression through lively personal essays by thirty-five top women writers--including two artists. In a culture that uses oppressive beauty standards to influence and determine what’s hot, how do women manage to find their own distinct style, and to delight in fashion, without feeling like they’re selling out, or buying into consumerism? It's So You emerges from third-wave feminism, which celebrates not only the frivolity and playfulness of women’s fashion, but also the daring aesthetics of sex workers, out queers, and fashionistas. Contributors include Six Feet Under Producer Jill Soloway, transgender icon Kate Bornstein, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, poet Diane di Prima, NPR regular Sandra Tsing Loh, novelist Beth Lisick, Calvin Klein model Jenny Shimizu, actress Laura Fraser, and writer/herstorian Trina Robbins. From the haute couture houses of the ruling class to DIY girls who make restorative clothing and create their own hodgepodge style, It's So You is the first book to explore women’s ambivalence, suspicion, indulgence, and love of fashion on every level.

35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style

It's So You

Beth Ditto

The lead singer of the band Gossip reveals her colorful life, from her humble beginnings as an overweight girl in rural Arkansas to her transformation into a glam lesbian diva with aspirations to save rock and roll. Original.

Coal to Diamonds

This novel charts the turbulent adventures of one girl in America as she moves from Boston's teenage goth world to whoring in New Age Tucson before finally arriving in San Francisco’s dyke underground.

The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America

After being hired and abruptly fired from the most popular shop at Square One Mall in Mogsfield, Massachusetts, fourteen-year-old Trisha Driscoll finds herself linked up with a chain-smoking, physically stunted mall rat named Rose, in a love story between two weirdo girls who soulfully explore the emptiness of contemporary culture. Reprint. 44,000 first printing.

Rose of No Man's Land

Jonathan Katz

E. G. Crichton

Chris Vargas

19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts

Matchmaking in the Archive

Blackwave

Award-winning author Michelle Tea ran away to San Francisco's queer and literary scenes in the early 90s, finding a home on the stages of various open mic venues and self-publishing a steady stream of very limited edition photocopied poetry chapbooks, all of which are available here, collected for the first time. Reflective themes of unrequited love and languor, hopes and heartbreak, prostitution and destitution fill every page with immediately accessible narrative lines. In these tender yet tough contemplations, Tea welcomes the reader to explore her innermost passions.

Michelle Tea

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