The Last Book I Loved: The Braindead Megaphone

George Saunders’s essays on writing are so cool and true I’ve been teaching them to my writing students. And his pieces about Dubai, and the young Buddha meditating forever in Nepal, are soaked in his own personality, the kind of journalism I really love, where the writer is right there in the story, and it works especially because this writer is so funny and compassionate and inquisitive and revealing. I think I would maybe like to be George Saunders. He also wrote my favorite short story, “CommComm.”

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Michelle Tea is the author of five memoirs: The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, Valencia, The Chelsea Whistle, Rent Girl, and How to Grow Up (Penguin/Plume). Her novels include Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, part of a YA fantasy trilogy published by McSweeney's, and Rose of No Man’s Land. Black Wave is a dystopic memoir-fiction hybrid. Forthcoming works include Castle on the River Vistula, the final installment of the YA series, and Modern Tarot, a tarot how-to and spell book published by Harper Elixir. Tea is the curator of the Amethyst Editions imprint at Feminist Press. She founded the literary non-profit RADAR Productions and the international Sister Spit performance tours, and is the former editor of Sister Spit Books, an imprint of City Lights. She created Mutha Magazine, an online publication about real-life parenting.

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