Andrea Portes to Read and Discuss her Debut Novel, Hick, at the Library

One of California’s brightest new literary stars, Andrea Portes, begins a regional library tour this April and one of her stops will be at the Buena Park Library. She’ll read from and discuss her “knockout” debut novel, Hick.

Saturday, April 12, 2008
2pm
Buena Park Library District
7150 La Palma Avenue, Buena Park, CA 90620
714-826-4100

The novel hit the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, was a May Book Sense Pick, a Midwest Connections Pick, and earned glowing reviews nationwide. All this for a new voice publishing with an independent press, which means, of course, that buzz continues to build about Portes herself, a young, hip, striking nightlife writer who survived a difficult, transient childhood only to reach Bryn Mawr…and now the bestseller list. Indeed, this new literary tour de force comes with as powerful a personal story as the ones she writes.

Hick is the story of Luli McMullen—feisty, precocious, and out on her own at 13. Luli is running away from Nebraska to Las Vegas, where she plans to escape her disturbing present and even less hopeful future by finding herself a sugar daddy. That Luli finds trouble on the road almost immediately is no surprise. But on her perilous journey west, she learns the truth of American rootlessness and discovers both the power and the peril of her own sexual curiosity.

It’s Luli’s voice that makes this novel gripping. She charts her own course with a vivacity and vision that marks her indelibly in any reader’s memory. Hick is quite a ride—raw and edgy, hilarious, hopeful and heartbreaking. It's at once a true-to-life portrait of an inviolable spirit threatened by drugs and alcohol, teen sex and crime, and a stubbornly idealistic novel about growing up in America.

Luli’s story is loosely based on Andrea Portes’ own childhood. Portes is a young writer who is becoming a cultural force in the hippest parts of Los Angeles. She grew up outside Lincoln, Nebraska, later shuffling between Illinois, Texas, Brazil, North Dakota, and North Carolina before attending Bryn Mawr College. She received her MFA in Theater from UC San Diego and became a script reader for Paramount Pictures. She now lives in Los Angeles and is a nightlife columnist for several websites.

Learn more about Andrea Portes at her website: http://www.myspace.com/andreaportes.