Debut Novel Out NOW
the avenue by
china martens
The Avenue is a novel about a single mother who works at an antique store – in 2004 before the stock market crash, when the antique stores had just started popping up everywhere in the increasingly white-on-white gentrified Hampden, Baltimore. It’s about wanting a better world and living in this one. It’s about a mango margarita and a record store guy. It’s about feeling like shit and selling expensive things. It’s about value, matter, and objects changing hands.
“Brilliant, heartbreaking, and utterly authentic, The Avenue announces the arrival of a literary powerhouse.”
— Ariel Gore, author of Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer
“alive, pulsing, and primal.”
— Amra Brooks, author of California
About china
China Martens is a zinestress extraordinaire born in Baltimore. Her first book, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others, is a compilation of 16 years of the zine she started in 1990. She is the co-editor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways To Support Families In Social Justice Movements & Communities (PM Press, 2012) and Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Front Lines (PM Press, 2016), an anthology which centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers voices, which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker called “Juicy, gutsy, vulnerable, and brave.” The Avenue is her first novel.
