Chelsea Girls

(Paperback, Main - Classic edition)

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Description

In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young queer artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, laughter, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the imposition of a rigid cultural identity.

Told in her audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls weaves together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed lesbianity, and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s and 80s New York.

Reviews

Despite having written the book 20 years ago, Myles's literary style feels as contemporary as the essayistic autobiographical fiction of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Tao Lin, who might be considered Myles's literary offspring. * New York Times *
[Myles's] very presence in the world is a form of activism, but the work, when studied with care, is also political in the sense that it gives evidence of one of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you're likely to find * New York Review of Books *
Unsettled in the best sense: restless, disturbing, changeable... Myles is exemplary for more and more young writers precisely because she has gone her own way. -- Ben Lerner * Paris Review *
One of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you're likely to find -- Dan Chiasson * New York Review of Books *
Reading Myles is nothing if not a physical experience, the one-two promise of a heartbeat that goes, I'm alive. I'm alive. * Electric Literature *
[This book], on all accounts, redefined the queer novel. * Wonderland *
Chelsea Girls offers poetry, sex, Catholicism, drugs, class and sexuality. This new reprint of Myles's hard-talking, lyrical autobiographical novel, about a female writer figuring things out in the 1960s, is the missing data for anyone who has read only the male American beat writers. -- Deborah Levy * New Statesman *

Author Bio

Eileen Myles is the author of more than twenty books, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, and most recently, I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1975-2014. Their many honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Art Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and their poems were featured in seasons two and three of the Emmy-winning show Transparent. They live in Marfa, Texas, and New York City. Visit their website at www.eileenmyles.com.