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.

Part love story, part social commentary, The Avenue captures the razor-thin balance between desire and necessity as Mattie moves from grocery store salad bar to antique shop, all while wrestling with her daughter's troubled relationship and her own devastating affair with the magnetic record store owner who becomes both salvation and ruin.

Martens writes with the unflinching honesty of her zine roots and the poetic sensibility of a born storyteller, finding magic in thrift store treasures, meaning in discarded objects, and hope in some of the most unlikely places. This is literature that refuses to look away from the complexities of class, motherhood, and longing in America—a stunning debut that establishes Martens as an essential new voice in contemporary fiction. 

"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

Author: China Martens
Publisher: Literary Kitchen
Pages: 100pp
Size: 5 x 8
Notes: paperback
Release Date: August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1950272457