All Books - - Items tagged as "Coming-of-age"
As a boutique press, Two Dollar Radio publishes bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.
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For a preview of each book, click on the "Sneak Peek" tab on each book's page, or check out our Issuu page here to view them all: Two Dollar Radio on Issuu
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Crapalachia New Classics Edition
a memoir by
Scott McClanahan
A Best Book of 2013
"[McClanahan] aims to
lasso the moon."
—New York Times Book Review
An endearing and haunting coming-of-age story that announces McClanahan as a resounding talent. Coming Soon!Crapalachia New Classics Edition
a memoir by
Scott McClanahan
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 10.00*One of the Best Books of 2013 —The Millions, Flavorwire, Dazed & Confused, The L Magazine, Time Out Chicago
"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. [McClanahan] aims to lasso the moon... He is not a writer of half-measures. The man has purpose. This is his symphony, every note designed to resonate, to linger."
—Allison Glock, New York Times Book ReviewSynopsis
Crapalachia is a portrait of Scott McClanahan’s formative years, coming of age in rural West Virginia, during a stretch of time where he was deeply influenced by his Grandma Ruby and Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.
Beyond the artistry, there is an optimism, a genuine love for people and the past and memories. Even more, there is a grasp to bridge the disconnect between reader and writer, for McClanahan’s stories to bind us closer to one another. -
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Us Fools
a novel by
Nora Lange
September 2024!
"Past and present seep and bleed in this assured, richly ruminative, darkly funny debut. With exacting lyricism, Nora Lange chronicles the tumult and chaotic love between two unforgettable sisters. Us Fools is a marvel of brutal wit and wild charm—a brilliant, sweeping chronicle of a singular American family."
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s. Us Fools
a novel by
Nora Lange
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.
A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.
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The Only Ones New Classics Edition
a novel by
Carola Dibbell
A Best Book of 2015
"Breathtaking. [Dibbell has] delivered a debut novel on par with some of the best speculative fiction of the past 30 years." —NPR
An edgy, intimate portrait of a mother and daughter in a post-pandemic world. The Only Ones New Classics Edition
a novel by
Carola Dibbell
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 10.00*10 Favorite Books of the Year (2015) —O, The Oprah Magazine
*Best science fiction and fantasy books of 2015 —The Washington Post
*One of the most anticipated books of 2015 —Dazed & Confused, BuzzFeedInez wanders a post-pandemic world, strangely immune to disease, making her living by volunteering as a test subject. She is hired to provide genetic material to a grief-stricken, affluent mother, who lost all four of her daughters within four short weeks. This experimental genetic work is policed by a hazy network of governmental Ethics committees, and threatened by the Knights of Life, religious zealots who raze the rural farms where much of this experimentation is done.
When the mother backs out at the last minute, Inez is left responsible for the product, which in this case is a baby girl, Ani. Inez must protect Ani, who is a scientific breakthrough, keeping her alive, dodging authorities and religious fanatics, and trying to provide Ani with the chilldhood tha Inez never had, which means a stable home and an education.
With a stylish voice, The Only Ones is a time-old story, tender and iconic, about how much we love our children, however they come, as well as a sly commentary on class, politics, and the complexities of reproductive technology.
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Pages of Mourning
a novel by
Diego Gerard Morrison
May 2024!
"Very funny and very sad and very, very smart. Unafraid to make his fiction work on and around questions of unambiguous gravity, Morrison never forgets the importance, indeed the power, in the endeavor of play."
—Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.
Pages of Mourning
a novel by
Diego Gerard Morrison
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99A daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death.
Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.
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Personal Score
a collection of essays by
Ellen van Neerven
April 2024!
"Demonstrates a new way to write toward Indigenous freedom. Personal Score hums with the vitality and intelligence of a definitive text."
—Billy-Ray Belcourt
Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.
Personal Score
a collection of essays by
Ellen van Neerven
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.
Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.
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A Questionable Shape New Classics Edition
a novel by
Bennett Sims
A Best Book of 2013
"[A Questionable Shape] is more than just a novel. It is literature. It is life."
Winner: Bard Fiction Prize
The Believer Book Award Finalist
—Susan Hazen-Hammond, The Millions
A calculated postmodern zombie novel by one of America's brightest literary talents.
The Two Dollar Radio - The New Classics edition features an original introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.A Questionable Shape New Classics Edition
a novel by
Bennett Sims
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19
*Bard Fiction Prize 2014
*The Believer Book Award Finalist
*One of the Best Books of 2013 —Complex Magazine, Book Riot, Slate, The L Magazine, NPR's 'On Point', SalonMazoch discovers an unreturned movie envelope, smashed windows, and a pool of blood in his father’s house: the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father’s haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.
However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch’s father.
Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.
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I Sing to Use the Waiting
a collection of essays by
Zachary Pace
January 2024!
"These essays span much more than women singers... How beautiful for a book’s form to echo what’s at the heart of this collection: The intersection of pop culture, social issues, and personal experience make up Pace’s claiming of their voice."
—Rachel León, Split Lip Magazine
With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.
I Sing to Use the Waiting
a collection of essays by
Zachary Pace
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.
With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.
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The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos
a novel by
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
"There’s a warmth and solemnity to Gregorio’s voice, as he reflects on death and strain, and the almost inarticulable woe of being an immigrant in the States post-2016. Restrepo Montoya, with poignancy, precision, and subtle force, explores the choices that lead us to the places we end up, and what we carry with us in memory and in action."
—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
Entrancing and sentimental, told with wit and sharp insight, The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos examines the joys and traumas of the Latinx American experience through the lens of a young man awakening to the nuances of identity, love, colonization, and home.
The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos
a novel by
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"Prescient and timeless, dealing with the inseparability of life and decay, this story, through it all, allowed me to sit deeply with love, family, and forgiveness. Pay attention, a refreshingly honest and singular voice has arrived."
—Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood HeatEntrancing and sentimental, told with wit and sharp insight, The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos examines the joys and traumas of the Latinx American experience through the lens of a young man awakening to the nuances of identity, love, colonization, and home.
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Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere
a memoir by
Robert Lopez
A Best Book of 2023
"Original and fearless... This is a sharply written, incisive, and extremely engaging meditation on assimilation that will strike a painful chord with many who have suffered from the same erasure of their culture in this country."
—Daniel A. Olivas, Latino Book Review
Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn’s diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from his grandfather’s remembered traits, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.
Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere
a memoir by
Robert Lopez
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"A masterpiece clear and honest and alive to the world and its contradictions. Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere will hit you where you live."
—Justin Torres, author of We the AnimalsRobert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family’s efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.
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The Red-Headed Pilgrim
a novel by
Kevin Maloney
A Best Book of 2023
"Somewhere between the hysterical realism of Zadie Smith and the sexy, witty misfits of a Tom Robbins novel."
—Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books
Provocative, poignant, and resoundingly hilarious, The Red-Headed Pilgrim is the tragicomic tale of an anxious red-head and his sordid pursuit of enlightenment and pleasure (not necessarily in that order).
The Red-Headed Pilgrim
a novel by
Kevin Maloney
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"The Red-Headed Pilgrim is a revelation that achieves starry dynamo-level energy from the jump. Maloney's prose is sharp and vivid, full of trippy precision, and his story is funny, wild, painful and wise."
—Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The AskThe Red-Headed Pilgrim is an irresistible novel of misadventure and new beginnings, of wanderlust and maybe bad decisions, of parenthood and divorce, and of the heartfelt truths we unearth when we least expect it.
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They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
a collection of essays by
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hardcover: Nov 2022!
A Best Book of 2017
"Funny, painful, precise, desperate, and loving throughout. Not a day has sounded the same since I read him."
—Greil Marcus, Village Voice
In this collection of essays, Hanif Abdurraqib, acclaimed poet and cultural critic, grapples with a storm cloud of confounding emotions with prose that is immediate, personal, poetic, sometimes funny and always deeply touching. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
a collection of essays by
Hanif Abdurraqib
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Best Books of 2017 —NPR, Buzzfeed, Paste Magazine, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC, Stereogum, National Post, Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot, Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Daily
*American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads'
*Midwest Indie BestsellerIn an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.