Publication Day!

So today’s the big day. It’s pub day for THE CITY WANTS YOU ALONE, the last book in the GIRL trilogy.

The three GIRL novels in brief:

GIRL: Andrea Marr is in high school exploring the Pacific Northwest (grunge) music scene. Set in Portland, OR, early 90s.

DREAM SCHOOL: Andrea is at a private east coast college where she meets cool interesting people and then gets kicked out for helping to make an “inappropriate” student film. Set in New England, mid-90s

THE CITY WANTS YOU ALONE: Andrea lands in New York, writes a novel, and enters the publishing business. Set in New York City, late 90s and beyond ….

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The main influences on the style of the GIRL trilogy were:

> Real teenage diaries different girls let me read.

>Tour diaries of bands (Henry Rollins).

>COMETBUS, DORIS, JIGSAW and other zines and original texts by young people.

>“Scene Reports” from Maximum Rock and Roll (local punk kids writing dispatches about their hometown bands).

>Live Journal diaries, when that was a thing.

>Various writings, ramblings, lyrics and notebooks of young musician women I knew in late 80s Portland, Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love most notably.

>Other biographies and oral histories from scenes of other eras like Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson (The Beats) and EDIE: An Oral History by Jean Stein (The Factory).

>Any written document that felt like real life: Andy Warhol’s Diaries, Jack Kerouac’s books and letters, autobiographies like The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll and I Need More by Iggy Pop.

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The main thing I was trying to do in the GIRL books was get the reader “out of the pages of a book and into the head of a character.” I wanted these books to “read themselves”. I wanted you to feel like you were talking to an excitable young person outside a club. Someone who was cool and smart and talked fast and didn’t stop to explain who was who, or to give you the backstory, or to explain why something was important. You could either follow along or you couldn’t. I wanted these books to be like a flowing river that never stopped, you couldn’t sit back and try to comprehend the totality of the river, you had to jump into it and let it carry you along.

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So yeah, here it is. The final installment. In high quality paperback. Hope you like it!

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Praise for DREAM SCHOOL:

“Dream School” is first and foremost an enduring account of what it looks, feels and sounds like to be young.  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

For a certain ’90s-obsessed set, Blake Nelson’s “Dream School” is the most anticipated book of the year.  —-THE DAILY

In 1994, Blake Nelson’s seminal coming-of-age text, Girl, introduced us to Andrea Marr, a bright, sensitive, Sassy-era Holden Caulfield for tortured, wannabe-rebel good girls. Nelson’s intimate depiction of Andrea — equally unmoored in the grunge clubs of Portland, Oregon, and in her high-school locker room, rocked by teen lust and a desire for independence — created a cultish following, the tales of frequent rereadings the stuff of legend. Today, Nelson hooks us up with Andrea in Dream School (Figment), an elite East Coast college, where the exquisite hell of searching for meaning and self rolls on. So clear the weekend and make room in your backpack. —-VANITY FAIR

I’m almost finished with Dream School and completely enjoying it: Girl heroine Andrea Marr leaves Portland for an East Coast private school, where she carries on being daffily privileged and obsessing about fashion and “coolness” and trying to decide what boys to sleep with and why. It’s a lot of fun. —-THE PORTLAND MERCURY

Blake Nelson has written 12 books, but his most beloved (by us at least) is probably his first, 1994’s Girl, which was written from the point of view of a suburban high school student named Andrea Marr and chronicles her discovering the mid-’90s music scene in Seattle, falling in love for the first time, and growing up a little. Dream School, the sequel to Girl, comes out next month and takes Andrea to college on the East Coast. —ROOKIE MAG

I first met Blake Nelson in the early 90s, when I was back at Sassy, and we published excerpts from his awesome first novel, "Girl." That book is now beloved by an entire generation. It tells the story of a suburban girl named Andrea Marr who discovers punk rock and alternative culture. Blake had an amazing ability to write in the voice of a teenage girl, even though he was a 20-something hipster guy. He has gone on to write a total of 12 books, which is both impressive and gives me book envy. Finally, in December, "Dream School," the sequel to Girl is coming out. It’s about what happens when Andrea goes off to college. You guys, it’s really good! —-XOJANE

How great is Blake Nelson? Read Girl, then Dream School. We dare you not to love these books. —I HEART DAILY

The magic of both Girl and Dream School is the way it reads so authentically like a diary, how all the mundane details and the funny little things and the tensions of friend dynamics and the big exciting moments and the moments of trouble and dread all are one, and you’re hooked. —MICHELLE TEA

Suffice it to say, I have read GIRL about five thousand times and each time I fall more in love with this rainy Portland punk rock love story. But Nelson’s writing transcends mere teen fodder. He writes convincing of growing up and discovering yourself, your friends, your sexuality and your dreams. Now he has written a sequel to GIRL, called Dream School, which comes out in December and chronicles Andrea’s misadventures at an elite east coast university. Suffice it to say, he rocks. —TEENAGE FILM

The sequel to Nelson’s wildly popular Girl, Figment co-founder Dana Goodyear edited Dream School with Nelson, who jumped at the chance to serialize first because it was a marketing plan that felt so smart. —BIG THINK

For years, whenever I went to the bookstore I would pass by the N end of fiction to see if a sequel to Girl had miraculously appeared. Eventually, I gave up hope. But now…. Blake Nelson is finally releasing Dream School, aka, Andrea Marr, the college years! —THE YA DEPARTMENT

Like many a woman born in the late ’70s/early ’80s, my first Girl exposure came via the excerpts that ran in Sassy magazine prior to the book’s publication – I can still see the illustration that accompanied the passage where Andrea runs into Todd Sparrow and Carla at the mall while Christmas-shopping for her brother. The book came out in September 1994 but I remember reading it in the dead of that winter – in my room, under the covers, in a dreamy/melancholic/post-Kurt kinda state of mind. My So-Called Life hit the air around the same time and as a result I always see Andrea as Angela; is that true for you too? Todd looks like this beautiful stoner boy in my gym class who was like the nice/non-aggro version of John Bender; Cybil looks like a girl at my junior-year bus stop who later joined the circus. Anyway: I’m happy Dream School will be out in winter and I look forward to hiding under the covers again, nearly two decades later. —-NO GOOD FOR ME