DELUXE SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF CHELSEA GIRLS, ONE OF ONLY 26 COPIES SIGNED BY EILEEN MYLES AND SPECIALLY HANDBOUND BY EARLE GRAY

MYLES, Eileen. Chelsea Girls. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1994. Octavo, original pictorial yellow paper boards, paper spine label. $1200.

Signed limited first edition of this autobiographical nonfiction novel, letter G of 26 copies lettered and signed by Eileen Myles and handbound by Earle Gray (out of a total edition of 326 copies).

"Published in 1994, the book is a nonfiction novel, or a fictional nonfiction, a Künstlerroman ('artists' novel') about a young woman, named Eileen Myles, who is from Arlington, Massachusetts. She is a poet, and she likes women but 'didn't know there was anything you could do with those feelings'… Chelsea Girls is a book of prose that reads like memoir and is called fiction" (Paris Review). Myles' autobiographical adventures recount her volatile '60s adolescence littered with vibrant memories of an alcoholic father and her awakening as a writer in the '70s. Myles revisits her risk-filled past because she wants desperately to be understood: 'It's lonely to be alive and never know the whole story… I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.' She views becoming a poet as a 'cultural accident' and depicts her calling as she knows and loves it—a life filled with drink, drugs, sex, love, loneliness and poverty… Myles is nothing if not honest, and her accounts of her life are so harsh that they stick with the reader as closely as they stick with her" (Publishers Weekly). This edition comprises 200 hardcover trade copies, 100 signed hardcover copies, and 26 copies handbound in boards by Earle Gray and signed by the author (as here).

Fine condition.