Michelle Tea is San Francisco’s reigning literary queer queen. Aside from her prolific body of work, she does a ton for the community through her nonprofit Radar Productions. Valencia is Tea’s novel about living and loving as a lesbian in San Francisco’s Mission District. The narrator hops from job to job, bar to bar, bed to bed, all in a novel that flies by as fast as actual youth does. It’s also a novel about an artist facing the horrible prospect of working for a living. As the narrator says, "No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work."

Recommended for: Baby dykes new in town. Lezzies still looking for love in the Mission. Old queers who want to reminisce about the glory days when Valencia Street wasn’t roaming with tech bros.