From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Synopses & Reviews
A groundbreaking and candid novel-in-real-time, considered a cult classic, from one of America's most celebrated poets
In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Told in her audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles 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 New York.
Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer's education, and a modern tale of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the chains of the rigid cultural identity meant to define her.
About the Author
Eileen Myles has published twenty books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction and libretti. She's a Guggenheim Fellow, has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America and a Lambda Award for lesbian fiction, and was named to the Whiting/Slate Second Novel List. She also received an arts writers grant from Creative Capital/ the Warhol Foundation and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. She lives in Marfa, Texas, and New York.