Funny, ultra-imaginative and completely unique. A crazy mash-up of autobiography, meta-fiction, sci-fi, existentialism, memoir, 90's nostalgia, and apocalyptic fiction. This was my first Michelle Tea book, and I loved it!

I love Michelle Tea, she is one of the greats. This felt like an exploration of her earlier novel/memoirs from a new perspective, where she is now i guess, and it is raw and beautiful and funny.

Wow, this book! It starts in San Francisco in the 1990s, focused on drug culture and queer culture. Originally I wasn't going to read this book because I have no reference point for drug culture and it always feels so foreign to read about it. But I started seeing some discussion of it and decided to give it a try. One chapter in, I was impressed by the vivid language but still not convinced.. then I got to the first sentence of chapter 2 and I was hooked. "That afternoon Michelle woke up on her...

-A review copy was sent to me from Disclaimer Magazine in association with And Other Stories. The original review was posted here.The Review:In this wanton riot of individuality, we hear the story of a struggling author who works in a book shop by day and experiments with hard drugs for artistic inspiration by night. Michelle Tea writes in a fast edgy style that reflects the nature of her character; it is chatty, modern and slightly eccentric. The protagonist, also named Michelle, lives a life w...

Reading this novel is like leaping from rock to rock across a rushing river when you're not sure there is any way to get all the way across or if instead you're just going to tumble in and get carried downstream. Fearless, propulsive motion. Liquid language that tumults forward. A collapse between writer, narrator, and reader that feels physical and actual, not metafictional and theoretical. It left me breathless and exhilarated.

I'm blown away by this book, which is a new kind of autofiction/anti-memoir/whatever/yes. Black Wave is simultaneously vintage Michelle Tea and something wholly new, even futurist. It’s a retelling of Michelle Tea's past as, or through, fiction (“fiction”)—and as a painful history that has to die. The sardonic flippancy of her earlier memoirs is here, but there’s an edge to it, self-loathing creeping through in the use of a detached, ironized third person point of view. It’s a sobriety narrative...

Wow. I don't know what just happened - this book contains so many things I normally hate (extensive descriptions of drug use, long dream sequences, a hipper than thou setting, a self-consciously post-modern approach to narrative )- and yet I loved it, couldn't put it down and hovered on the brink of 5 stars before settling on 4.5. Kudos Ms. Tea. I thought Black Wave was going to be this year's How Should A Person Be or Ban en Banlieue, each of which took the memoir-novel-feminist-pomo-hipster sl...

This is one of the stranger books I have read it won't be for everyone but I absolutely loved it.

4,5What to say, what to say?Imagine a Jackson Pollock painting. You love or hate it. That's one thing.Secondly, nobody can do a better job at painting a Jackson Pollock-like painting than Jackson Pollock.I had the same thing with Black wave. This book -feral, messed-up, extreme as it is- could not have been written any better than it was by Michelle Tea. Her ink is splattering, her voice so present and personal, her metaphors wild yet hitting your harder and softer spots. From the first to the l...

This is a two-part apocalyptic story written in the format of a “fictional memoir.” In the first part, protagonist Michelle is living in the Mission District in San Francisco, working in a bookstore, and trying to write a book. Her life is a hot mess. She drinks, takes lots of drugs, and engages in many sexual liaisons. She gets caught in a spiral of self-destructive behavior. She moves to Los Angeles, near her brother, where she gets a job in another bookshop and begins re-writing her book. She...

This is one of those books that I would have never picked up if left to my own devices. Silly Me! Even when Black Wave came up as a Buddy Read for my Newest Literary Fiction group, I shunned it. Goodreads reviews got posted and still I dallied. What propelled me to actually get off my rump and get this book was its inclusion on the Tournament of Books shortlist. Black Wave is an apocalyptic novel written in two parts: The first part is set in San Francisco’s Queer sub-culture. It highlights the

Black Wave is possibly the most fearless and daring book of Michelle's career. It’s a novel with clear autobiographical roots but with a twist of apocalypse and reinvention. As always, Tea’s prose is visceral and close-up, burrowing under your skin. But it also drifts back, getting a wider view of the full story as the book’s hero, also named Michelle, leaves behind the bittersweet good times of her San Francisco identity (shout-out to The Chameleon poetry bar) and moves to Los Angeles (shout-ou...

One girl was doing an art project in which she documented herself urinating on every SUV she encountered.Hmmm....I took out a subscription to support the wonderful press And Other Stories, publishers of such great books as the BTBA winning Signs Preceding the End of the World, the Goldsmith's shortlisted Martin John, Swimming Home and The Folly. One issue with this model is that one doesn't have any discretion over the books included, and the first book, with my name printed in the back with the...

For most of my reading life, I have consciously avoided feminist and LGBTQ literature, finding the former too strident for my taste and the latter too foreign to my life experience to relate to. That I drew most of my TBR list from the New York Times Book Review did nothing to counter this tendency. Since joining the Goodreads community and, more specifically, such groups as Newest Literary Fiction and The Tournament of Books, however, I have begun to expand my readerly horizons and have fallen

Along with Tea's usual whip-smart social analysis and sly humor, Black Wave delivers a goodly dose of something I can only call Wisdom. As a bonus, readers are treated to lushly complex (and sometimes baroquely hallucinatory) prose and plot. This will definitely join the canon of Great Queer Literature and be read for decades, perhaps centuries, to come.

A goodreads list of Jeff VanderMeer's climate fiction recommendations led me to 'Black Wave'. I don't think it's a climate change novel really, or at least didn't read it as such. The end of the world, caused by environmental destruction, certainly features. But it seemed to me more focused on the details of personal apocalypses: mental illness, drug & alcohol addiction, and loneliness. This isn't a criticism, as I found the writing really vivid and insightful. It follows Michelle, the protagoni...

I've loved reading Michelle Tea since the early 2000s.... I've written in review here before about how I felt that she was a kindred spirit. I love how she writes, what she writes about - the books, the drinking, astrology and tarot (she has a new tarot book coming out soon!). But then I haven't felt so connected to her young adult books and had mixed feelings about her memoir. So. I went into this with trepidation. It starts kinda regular Michelle Tea - it's San Francisco in 1999 - drugs, drink...

part memoir, part writing process tell-all, part sci-fi, part political/social commentary, part gender study, part love song to life, messy life — full fucking genius.

Well this was interesting. I love Michelle Tea. I've seen her perform or read like 4 times. I've got signed copies of Rent Girl and Chelsea Whistle and Rose of No Man's Land as well as a huge signed photograph of her running with a popsicle hanging in my living room. But despite all the rave reviews her newest title is getting, I had a lot of trouble getting into Blackwave. It honestly started out just like all her memoirs and most of her fiction, obviously about her life even when its thinly ve...

this was the perfect book to read in dystopian 2016 where it feels like all the good people are dying to spare them the coming environmental apocalypse and you're kinda nostalgic about your misspent queer youth but also keenly aware of how horrible it was. i kept grabbing markers from my bed and floor to underline quotes that were so great i needed to remember them. this book made me feel very "seen" in a weird way. i read a lot and most books require a certain amount of adjusting to relate to t...