China Martens presents her first novel, The Avenue.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.
From groundbreaking zinester and essayist China Martens comes a raw, luminous debut novel that transforms the gritty everyday of working-class Baltimore into something transcendent. Following Mattie, a thirty-eight-year-old single mom navigating precarious employment, teenage chaos, and heartbreak on The Avenue, Martens crafts an unflinching portrait of survival that pulses with magic and beauty.
"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
Event Venue
Atomic Books, 3618 Falls Rd, Baltimore, MD 21211-1846, United States
