All Books - - Items tagged as "Female protagonist"
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.
Books are shown in 'newest to oldest' view, which you can change with the Sort option below.
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
-
QUICK VIEW
What We Tried to Bury Grows Here (FORTHCOMING)
a novel by
Julian Zabalbeascoa
November 2024!
“What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a startling book, beautiful and horrific, that navigates the complexities of Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War, in which fascism and communism, regionalism and nationalism, and faith and skepticism do battle across a brilliantly evoked, suffering landscape."
—Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries
A masterly crafted and haunting tale of survival, longing, and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War. Coming Soon!What We Tried to Bury Grows Here (FORTHCOMING)
a novel by
Julian Zabalbeascoa
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99Julian Zabalbeascoa is a fierce and assured new talent, and <i>What We Tried to Bury Grows Here</i> is a remarkable feat of research and imagination, as well as a transcendent literary accomplishment.
In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain, spurred to join the fight to preserve his country’s democracy from the insurrectionists by the rousing words of a political essayist. Months earlier, Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain’s newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.
In Bilbao, Mariana raises her two young children while, with her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup and their German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro’s lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways.
Through a chorus of voices—a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her in order to fight against the fascists, among others—we follow Isidro and Mariana as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart. -
QUICK VIEW
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.
-
QUICK VIEW
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.
-
QUICK VIEW
Landscapes
a novel by
Christine Lai
A Best Book of 2023
"A rich meditation on the burden of remembrance, the ruins of the past, and the ruins that climate crisis will soon bring us, Landscapes is a tightly woven debut that travels easily between epistles, point of view shifts, and art criticism... As much as Landscapes is about destruction and decay, it is equally about picking up the ruins and rebuilding."
—Christina Wood, Full Stop
Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an evocative reinvention of the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.
Landscapes
a novel by
Christine Lai
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99An entrancing and prismatic debut novel by Christine Lai, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.
Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an evocative reinvention of the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.
-
QUICK VIEW
At the Edge of the Woods
a novel by
Kathryn Bromwich
A Best Book of 2023
"An accomplished, unsettling debut... of what it means to inhabit a female body but to reject femininity, and to feel a connection with the natural world that embodies both awe and terror. In this, its themes could not be more timely."
—Stephanie Merritt,
The Guardian
With assurance and remarkable dexterity, Kathryn Bromwich’s masterful debut novel is a rich, gorgeously descriptive account of a woman hiding from old ghosts and new in the Italian Alps, while rekindling her own sense of self through nature.
At the Edge of the Woods
a novel by
Kathryn Bromwich
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"Bromwich infects the senses with dread and wicked insight from the first page to the last—this is a stunning experience not to be missed."
—Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh MansionWith assurance and remarkable dexterity, Kathryn Bromwich’s masterful debut novel is a rich, gorgeously descriptive account of a woman hiding from old ghosts and new in the Italian Alps, while rekindling her own sense of self through nature.
-
QUICK VIEW
She Is Haunted
a collection of stories by
Paige Clark
Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Shortlist
2022 Stella Prize, Longlist"In turns devastating and hilarious, Clark’s exceptional debut collection cuts right to the emotional core of its characters and their conflicts in stories that examine Asian identity, familial relationships, climate anxiety, and gender with an astonishing sense of nuance and clarity."
—Publishers Weekly, starred
With an unforgettable voice and exuberant wit, She Is Haunted is a masterful debut exploring issues of identity, connection, and loss, told with remarkable grace and assurance by Chinese/American/Australian author, Paige Clark.
She Is Haunted
a collection of stories by
Paige Clark
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"She Is Haunted is electrically original in both prose style and energy. Fans of inventive fiction such as Elizabeth Tan’s recent Readings Prize-winning Smart Ovens for Lonely People or Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties will find much to admire about She Is Haunted, but this collection will also resonate with anyone drawn to stories of identity and connection, especially female friendships and mother-daughter relationships. An absolute pleasure to read."
—Stella Charls, bookseller at Readings CarltonA ballerina nurses an injured leg and struggles to learn Cantonese while her husband dances on an international tour of Don Quixote with a new female lead; a mother cuts her daughter’s hair because her own hair begins falling out; a woman undergoes brain surgery in order to live more comfortably in extreme temperatures; a woman attempts to physically transform into her dead husband so that she does not have to grieve.
-
QUICK VIEW
New Animal
a novel by
Ella Baxter
Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Shortlist
"For fans of Sally Rooney’s brand of millennial malaise and Six Feet Under’s tragicomic take on the mortuary business, New Animal is at turns graphic, raw and tender—a wholly human exploration of the Venn diagram of emotion."
—Sarah Stiefvater, PureWow
New Animal is a poignant, darkly comedic look at human connection from a biting and original new voice in Ella Baxter.
New Animal
a novel by
Ella Baxter
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"A story about sex, connection and, comically, the Tasmanian BDSM scene, that is by turns profound and funny."
—Kylie Northover, The AgeNew Animal is a poignant, darkly comedic look at human connection from a biting and original new voice in Ella Baxter.
Amelia Aurelia is approaching thirty and her closest relationships — other than her mother — are through her dating apps. She works at the family mortuary business as a cosmetic mortician with her eccentric step-father and older brother, whose throuple’s current preoccupation is with what type of snake to adopt. When Amelia’s affectionate mother passes away without warning, she is left without anchor. Fleeing the funeral, she seeks solace with her birth-father in Tasmania and stumbles into the local BDSM community, where her riotous attempts to belong are met with confusion, shock, and empathy.
Hilarious and heartfelt, New Animal reveals hard-won truths as Amelia struggles to find her place in the world without her mother, with the help of her two well-intentioned fathers and adventures at the kink club. -
QUICK VIEW
The Underneath
a novel by
Melanie Finn
"Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller."
—New York Times
With the assurance and grace of her acclaimed novel The Gloaming—which earned her comparisons to Patricia Highsmith—Melanie Finn returns with a precisely layered and tense new literary thriller that travels from the Northeast Kingdom to remote Africa. The Underneath
a novel by
Melanie Finn
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99With the assurance and grace of her acclaimed novel The Gloaming—which earned her comparisons to Patricia Highsmith—Melanie Finn returns with a precisely layered and tense new literary thriller.
The Underneath follows Kay Ward, a former journalist struggling with the constraints of motherhood. Along with her husband and two children, she rents a quaint Vermont farmhouse for the summer. The idea is to disconnect from their work-based lifestyle—that had her doggedly pursuing a genocidal leader of child soldiers known as General Christmas, even through Kay's pregnancy and the birth of their second child—in an effort to repair their shaky marriage.
It isn't long before Kay's husband is called away and she discovers a mysterious crawlspace in the rental with unsettling writing etched into the wall. Alongside some of the house's other curiosities and local sleuthing, Kay is led to believe that something terrible may have happened to the home's owners.
Kay's investigation leads her to a local logger, Ben Comeau, a man beset with his own complicated and violent past. A product of the foster system and life-long resident of the Northeast Kingdom, Ben struggles to overcome his situation, and to help an abused child whose addict mother is too incapacitated to care about the boy's plight.
The Underneath is an intelligent and considerate exploration of violence—both personal and social—and whether violence may ever be justified. -
QUICK VIEW
I Will Die in a Foreign Land
a novel by
Kalani Pickhart
A Best Book of 2021
Winner: 2022 Young Lions Fiction Award"Since 1991, Ukraine has experienced three revolutions, and Pickhart elegantly captures how these events build up inside a person, giving many Ukrainians an acute awareness of the self as both agent and consequence of history."
—Sonya Bilocerkowycz, The Los Angeles Review of Books
An especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious and intimate portrait of human perseverance and empathy following four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land
a novel by
Kalani Pickhart
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"Kalani Pickhart's I Will Die in a Foreign Land is of the best kind of protest novels: one that makes you cry, and then makes you mad as hell. It is so far the best artistic treatment of the Euromaidan and Crimean situation, at turns tense, melancholy, and over-abundantly compassionate. This book is both the napalm and the bandages in one."
—Conor Hultman, Square Books (Oxford, MS)In 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées in Paris. The work so perplexed audiences that a riot broke out. “Only a Russian could do that,” says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.”
A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is a Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death from radiation sickness; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano.
As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.
While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy.
-
QUICK VIEW
A Mouthful of Air
a novel by
Amy Koppelman
Now a major motion picture starring Amanda Seyfried and Finn Wittrock!
"...[a] novel that quietly builds suspense to the last page."
—Dallas Morning News
Compared to seminal feminist works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, A Mouthful of Air is a powerful, tragic statement on motherhood, family, and survival.
A Mouthful of Air
a novel by
Amy Koppelman
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 15.99"...[a] novel that quietly builds suspense to the last page."
—Dallas Morning NewsCompared to seminal feminist works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, A Mouthful of Air is a powerful, tragic statement on motherhood, family, and survival.
-
QUICK VIEW
A Door Behind a Door
a novel by
Yelena Moskovich
DW Reviews "Pick of the Month"
"Moskovich mystifies with this vivid story of a pair of estranged siblings who immigrated to Milwaukee from the Soviet Union as children in 1991... The dynamic style and psychological depth make this an engaging mind bender.” —Publishers Weekly
From visionary author, Yelena Moskovich, A Door Behind A Door follows Olga as she puzzles her way in search of her missing brother, tangling with an underground Midwestern Russian mafia in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings. A Door Behind a Door
a novel by
Yelena Moskovich
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song."
—The Guardian on VirtuosoIn Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.
-
QUICK VIEW
Night Rooms
a collection of essays by
Gina Nutt
A Best Book of 2021
"[Nutt] spins a striking tale of survival and loss in this haunting essay collection. Nutt uses familiar tropes from horror films as a window into her thinking... Lovers of the personal essay will be thrilled by this innovative collection."
2022 IPPY Medalist for Essay
—Publishers Weekly
Night Rooms is a poetic, intimate collection of personal essays that weaves together fragmented images from horror films and cultural tropes to meditate on anxiety and depression, suicide, body image, identity, grief, and survival.
Night Rooms
a collection of essays by
Gina Nutt
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99Night Rooms is a poetic, intimate collection of personal essays that weaves together fragmented images from horror films and cultural tropes to meditate on anxiety and depression, suicide, body image, identity, grief, and survival.
Whether competing in shopping mall beauty pageants, reflecting on childhood monsters and ballet lessons, or recounting dark cultural ephemera while facing grief and authenticity in the digital age, Gina Nutt’s shifting style echoes the sub-genres that Night Rooms highlights—spirit-haunted slow burns, possession tales, slashers, and revenge films with a feminist bent.
Refracting life through the lens of horror films, Night Rooms masterfully leaps between reality and movies, past and present—because the “final girl’s” story is ultimately a survival story told another way. -
QUICK VIEW
The Hare
a novel by
Melanie Finn
A Best Book of 2021
"Daring and unputdownable, The Hare is set to be one of the most talked-about books of 2021."
Vermont Book Award, Winner
—Jenny Hollander, Marie Claire
The Hare is an affecting portrait of Rosie Monroe, her resilience and personal transformation, of her life under the male gaze, and serves as a striking statement about what it means to be a woman in the world.
The Hare
a novel by
Melanie Finn
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"Daring and unputdownable, The Hare is set to be one of the most talked-about books of 2021."
—Jenny Hollander, Marie Claire"With The Hare, Melanie Finn has written a powerful story of female perseverance, strength, and resilience. This book has rare qualities: beautiful writing while being absolutely unputdownable, and I will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know." —Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange, Our Endless Numbered Days, and Swimming Lessons
"This is a page-turner about a tough woman and her con-artist lout of a partner, and I will eat my laptop if it doesn’t get optioned for TV or film the minute it hits bookshelves. It is also woven through with ideas about feminism, parenting, narcissism, and self-sufficiency—a book that is easy to read without being remotely lightweight." —Molly Young, Vulture
The Hare is an affecting portrait of Rosie Monroe, her resilience and personal transformation, of her life under the male gaze, and serves as a striking statement about what it means to be a woman in the world.
Raised by a stern grandmother to be obedient and obliging in an unremarkable blue-collar town in Massachusetts, Rosie accepts a scholarship to art school in New York City in the 1980s. One morning at a museum she meets a worldly man twenty years her senior, with access to the upper crust of New England society. Bennett is dashing, knows that “boats” refer to yachts (though you never use the word “yacht”), teaches her which direction to spoon soup, and tells stories of “Hemingway moments,” of escapades with Truman Capote and Hunter Thompson in exotic locales. Soon, Rosie is living in a boathouse with Bennett on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, and a daughter — Miranda — is born, just as Bennett’s current con goes awry and forces them to abscond in the middle of the night to the untamed wilderness of Northern Vermont.
Almost immediately, Rosie and Miranda are left at an uninsulated cabin without a car or cash for weeks at a time, so Bennett can tend to a teaching job that may or may not exist at a local university. Rosie is forced to survive on her own, to care for her young daughter, to learn how to stack firewood, snowshoe into town, hunt for wild game, and forage in the forest. As Rosie and Miranda’s life gradually begins to normalize, Bennett and his cons catch up to him, and Rosie is forced to ultimately confront Bennett’s simmering obsession and malevolence.
The Hare is an astounding new literary thriller from a celebrated author at the height of her storytelling powers.
-
QUICK VIEW
Alligator and Other Stories
a collection of stories by
Dima Alzayat
A Best Book of 2020
"The richly detailed short fictions in this debut from a Damascus-born scribe form an intricate, breathtaking mosaic of modern Muslim life."
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award Finalist
Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize Finalist
The Story Prize Longlist
Arab American Book Awards, Honorable Mention
—Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine
Alligator and Other Stories is haunting, spellbinding, and unforgettable, while marking Dima Alzayat’s arrival as a tremendously gifted new talent. Alligator and Other Stories
a collection of stories by
Dima Alzayat
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"Alzayat’s slim, powerful debut collection showcases the author’s deep empathy and imagination in stories about grief, assimilation, and trauma... This intelligent collection is a force to be reckoned with."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review*2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Short Story Collection, Finalist.
*2021 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2021, Longlist."A stellar debut... Alzayat manages to execute a short but thoughtful meditation on the spectrum of race in America from Jackson’s presidency to present." —Colin Groundwater, GQ
"The richly detailed short fictions in this debut from a Damascus-born scribe form an intricate, breathtaking mosaic of modern Muslim life." —Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine
The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat’s collection are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman performing burial rites for her brother in “Ghusl,” or a great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in “Once We Were Syrians.”
Alzayat’s stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of “Only Those Who Struggle Succeed,” the New York City children on the lookout for a place to play on the heels of Etan Patz’s kidnapping in “Disappearance,” and the “dangerous” women of “Daughters of Manāt” who struggle to assert their independence.
The title story, “Alligator,” is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and intergenerational trauma, told in an epistolary format through social media posts, newspaper clippings, and testimonials, that starts with the true story of the lynching of a Syrian immigrant couple by law officers in small-town Florida. Placed in a wider context of U.S. racial violence, the extrajudicial deaths, and what happens to the couple’s children and their children’s children in the years after, challenges the demands of American assimilation and its limits.
Alligator and Other Stories is haunting, spellbinding, and unforgettable, while marking Dima Alzayat’s arrival as a tremendously gifted new talent. -
QUICK VIEW
Virtuoso
a novel by
Yelena Moskovich
A Best Book of 2020
"A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song...” —Shahidha Bari, The Guardian
Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize Finalist
With a distinctive prose flair and spellbinding vision, Virtuoso is a story of love, loss, and self-discovery that heralds Yelena Moskovich as a brilliant and one-of-a-kind visionary. Virtuoso
a novel by
Yelena Moskovich
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song."
—The GuardianAs Communism begins to crumble in Prague in the 1980s, Jana’s unremarkable life becomes all at once remarkable when a precocious young girl named Zorka moves into the apartment building with her mother and sick father. With Zorka's signature two-finger salute and abrasive wit, she brings flair to the girls’ days despite her mother’s protestations to not “be weird.” But after scorching her mother’s prized fur coat and stealing from a nefarious teacher, Zorka suddenly disappears.
Meanwhile in Paris, Aimée de Saint-Pé married young to an older woman, Dominique, an actress whose star has crested and is in decline. A quixotic journey of self-discovery, Virtuoso follows Zorka as she comes of age in Prague, Wisconsin, and then Boston, amidst a backdrop of clothing logos, MTV, computer coders, and other outcast youth. But it isn’t till a Parisian conference hall brimming with orthopedic mattresses and therapeutic appendages when Jana first encounters Aimée, their fates steering them both to a cryptic bar on the Rue de Prague, and, perhaps, to Zorka.
With a distinctive prose flair and spellbinding vision, Virtuoso is a story of love, loss, and self-discovery that heralds Yelena Moskovich as a brilliant and one-of-a-kind visionary. -
QUICK VIEW
The Book of X
a novel by
Sarah Rose Etter
A Best Book of 2019
"Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything."
Winner: Shirley Jackson Award for Novel
—Roxane Gay
A surreal exploration of one woman’s life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men. The Book of X
a novel by
Sarah Rose Etter
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99*Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel
*The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Editors' Longlists in Fiction
*The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction longlist
*2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist
*A Best Book of 2019 —Vulture, Entropy, Buzzfeed, ThrillistA surreal exploration of one woman’s life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.
The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday—school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents—with the surreal—rivers of thighs, men for sale and fields of throats—Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.
-
QUICK VIEW
Triangulum
a novel by
Masande Ntshanga
2020 Nomo Awards Shortlist: Best Novel
"Magnificently disorienting and meticulously constructed, Triangulum couples an urgent subtext with an unceasing sense of mystery. This is a thought-provoking dream of a novel."
—Tobias Carroll, Tor.com
Triangulum is an ambitious, often philosophical and genre-bending novel that covers a period of over 40 years in South Africa’s recent past and near future. Triangulum
a novel by
Masande Ntshanga
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99Triangulum is an ambitious, often philosophical and genre-bending novel that covers a period of over 40 years in South Africa’s recent past and near future — starting from the collapse of the apartheid homeland system in the early 1990s, to the economic corrosion of the 2010s, and on to the looming, large-scale ecological disasters of the 2040s.
In 2040, the South African National Space Agency receives a mysterious package containing a memoir and a set of digital recordings from an unnamed woman who claims the world will end in ten years. Assigned to the case, Dr. Naomi Buthelezi, a retired professor and science-fiction writer, is hired to investigate the veracity of the materials, and whether or not the woman's claim to have heard from a “force more powerful than humankind” is genuine.
Thus begins TRIANGULUM, a found manuscript composed of the mysterious woman’s memoir and her recordings. Haunted by visions of a mysterious machine, the narrator is a seemingly adrift 17-year-old girl, whose sick father never recovered from the shock of losing his wife. She struggles to navigate school, sexual experimentation, and friendship across racial barriers in post-Apartheid South Africa.
When three girls go missing from their town, on her mother's birthday, the narrator is convinced that it has something to do with "the machine" and how her mother also went missing in the '90s. Along with her friends, Litha and Part, she discovers a puzzling book on UFOs at the library, the references and similarities in which lead the friends to believe that the text holds clues to the narrators’s mother's abduction. Drawing upon suggestions in the text, she and her friends set out on an epic journey that takes them from their small town to an underground lab, a criminal network, and finally, a mysterious, dense forest, in search of clues as to what happened to the narrator's mother.
With extraordinary aplomb and breathtaking prose, Ntshanga has crafted an inventive and marvelous artistic accomplishment. -
QUICK VIEW
The Word for Woman Is Wilderness
a novel by
Abi Andrews
"Beguiling, audacious... displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue."
—Sarah Moss, The Guardian
This is a new kind of nature writing—one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape. The Word for Woman Is Wilderness
a novel by
Abi Andrews
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"Beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue."
—Sarah Moss, The GuardianThis is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape.
Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective.
The book is a fictional time-capsule curated by Erin from this time comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics.
-
QUICK VIEW
Away! Away!
a novel by
Jana Beňová
Translated by Janet Livingstone
"Beňová’s short, fast novels are a revolution against normality."
—Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, ORF
Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, Away! Away! is a shimmering mosaic examining human relationships, from Slovakia's most acclaimed novelist. Away! Away!
a novel by
Jana Beňová
Translated by Janet Livingstone
$ 7.99View full product details →$ 8.99"Beňova’s novel riffs on stories old and new, and the means by which we tell and experience them, to bring the reader inside her protagonist’s mind."
—Vol. 1 BrooklynSometimes running away is the bravest option. Or, so believes Rosa, who ditches her husband and home and takes off on the road. Along the way, she encounters the owner of a puppet theater who’s on a mission to conquer the world with his performance of The Snow Queen.
Which character from this old fairy tale will Rosa identify with? With Gerda, searching fruitlessly for her lost love? With Kai, who flees home and his beloved one day without a word? Or with the Snow Queen, who seems to stand aloof above it all?
With magnetic, sparkling prose, Beňová delivers a lively mosaic that ruminates on human relationships, our greatest fears and desires.
-
QUICK VIEW
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
a novel by
Katya Apekina
A Best Book of 2018
L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist"It's a stunningly accomplished book, and Apekina isn't afraid to grab her readers by the hand and take them to some very dark and very beautiful places."
—Michael Schaub, NPR
Powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
a novel by
Katya Apekina
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99*A Best Book of 2018 —Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed News, Entropy, LitReactor
It’s 16-year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother’s dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success.
The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart—Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.
Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession. -
QUICK VIEW
The Blurry Years
a novel by
Eleanor Kriseman
A Best Book of 2018
"Assured and affecting... Kriseman’s is a new voice to celebrate."
—Publishers Weekly
A powerful and unorthodox coming-of-age story from an assured new literary voice, featuring a stirringly twisted mother-daughter relationship, set against the sleazy, vividly-drawn backdrop of late-seventies and early-eighties Florida. The Blurry Years
a novel by
Eleanor Kriseman
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99*Best Books of 2018 —Entropy
The Blurry Years is a powerful and unorthodox coming-of-age story from an assured new literary voice, featuring a stirringly twisted mother-daughter relationship, set against the sleazy, vividly-drawn backdrop of late-seventies and early-eighties Florida.
Callie—who ages from six to eighteen over the course of the book—leads a scattered childhood, moving from cars to strangers’ houses to the sand-dusted apartments of the tourist towns that litter the Florida coastline.
Callie’s is a story about what it’s like to grow up too fast and absorb too much, to watch adults behaving badly; what it’s like to be simultaneously in thrall to and terrified of the mother who is the only family you've ever known, who moves you from town to town to leave her own mistakes behind.
With precision and poetry, Kriseman's moving tale of a young girl struggling to find her way in the world is potent, and, ultimately, triumphant. -
QUICK VIEW
Seeing People Off
a novel by
Jana Beňová
Translated by Janet Livingstone
Winner: European Union Prize for Literature
"A fascinating novel. Fans of inward-looking postmodernists like Clarice Lispector will find much to admire here."
—NPR
Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, Seeing People Off is the quirky, radical English-language by Slovakia's most acclaimed novelist. Seeing People Off
a novel by
Jana Beňová
Translated by Janet Livingstone
$ 7.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.
"Beňová is at her best when she's funny, and her sense of humor tends toward the dry and the dark. Seeing People Off is a fascinating novel. Fans of inward-looking postmodernists like Clarice Lispector will find much to admire here."
—NPRThere is a liveliness and effervescence to Jana Beňová’s prose that is magnetic. Whether addressing the loneliness of relationships or the effectiveness of rat poison, her voice and observations call to mind the verve and sophistication of Renata Adler or Rosalyn Drexler, while remaining utterly singular.
Seeing People Off follows Elza and Ian, a young couple living in a humongous apartment complex outside Bratislava where the walls play music and talk, and time is immaterial.
Drawing on her memories, everyday interactions, observations of post-socialist realities, and Elza’s attraction to actor Kalisto Tanzi, Seeing People Off is a kaleidoscopic, poetic, and deeply funny portrait of a relationship. -
QUICK VIEW
The Gloaming
a novel by
Melanie Finn
A Best Book of 2016
"Deeply satisfying. Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller. [The Gloaming] deserves major attention."
—New York Times
Shortlisted for The Guardian's 'Not the Booker Prize,' The Gloaming is a compelling, adventurous novel of consequences. The Gloaming
a novel by
Melanie Finn
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99* New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2016.
* The Guardian's "Not the Booker Prize" Shortlist.
* Publishers Weekly's 'Big Indie Books of Fall 2016'"Deeply satisfying. Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller. [The Gloaming] deserves major attention."
—John Williams, New York TimesIn rich, compelling prose, Melanie Finn perfectly captures a world of consequences, and the characters who must survive them. Pilgrim Jones' husband has just left her for another woman, stranding her in a small Swiss town where she is one day involved in a tragic car accident that leaves 3 school-children dead. Cleared of responsibility though overcome with guilt, she alights for Africa, where she befriends a series of locals each with their own tragic past, each isolated in their own private way in the remote Tanzanian outpost.
Mysteriously, the remains of an albino African appear packaged in a box, spooking everyone—sign of a curse placed by a witch doctor—though its intended recipient is uncertain. Pilgrim volunteers to rid the town of the box and its contents, though wherever she goes, she can't shake the feeling that she's being followed.
The Gloaming is a thrilling, haunting new work of guilt, atonement, and finally, hope.
-
QUICK VIEW
Not Dark Yet
a novel by
Berit Ellingsen
A Best Book of 2015
"[Ellingsen] is just starting what promises to be a major career, but already giving readers a unique and fascinating perspective."
—Jeff VanderMeer
A rich character-driven drama, addressing questions of personal morals and societal ethics, set on the cusp of a self-inflicted apocalypse. Not Dark Yet
a novel by
Berit Ellingsen
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Favorite books of 2015 —Electric Literature
"Fascinating, surreal, gorgeously written, and like nothing you’ve ever read before, Not Dark Yet is the book we all need to read right now. It is art about science, climate change, and activism, and it vitally explores how we as people deal with a world that is transforming in terrifying ways."
—BuzzFeedBrandon leaves his boyfriend in the city for a quiet life in the mountains after an affair with a professor ends with Brandon being forced to kill a research animal. It is a violent, unfortunate episode that conjures memories from his military background.
In the mountains, his new neighbors are using the increased temperatures to stage an ambitious agricultural project in an effort to combat globally heightened food prices and shortages. Brandon gets swept along with their optimism, while simultaneously applying to a new astronaut training program. However, he learns that these changes—internal, external—are irreversible.
A sublime love story coupled with the universal struggle for personal understanding, Not Dark Yet is an informed novel of consequences with an ever-tightening emotional grip on the reader. -
QUICK VIEW
Binary Star
a novel by
Sarah Gerard
L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist
A Best Book of 2015
"Rhythmic, hallucinatory, yet vivid as crystal."
—NPR
An intense, elegiac portrait of young lovers as they battle personal afflictions. Binary Star
a novel by
Sarah Gerard
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist.
*Best Books of 2015 —NPR,Vanity Fair
*Best Fiction of 2015 —BuzzFeed
*Best Independent Press Books 2015 —Flavorwire
*Favorite Novels 2015 —Largehearted BoyThe language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.
With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road-trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction.
Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success. -
QUICK VIEW
Frequencies Volume 4
a collection of essays by
Colin Asher, Nathan Knapp, Joshua Mohr, & more!
"It's like The Believer just up and said 'fuck it.'" —Brooklyn Based
Coming of age in the heady days of dial-up, family strife, plus a satirical interview with Shia LaBeouf. Frequencies Volume 4
a collection of essays by
Colin Asher, Nathan Knapp, Joshua Mohr, & more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
QUICK VIEW
Frequencies Volume 3
a collection of essays by
Antonia Crane, D. Foy, Lawrence Shainberg,
& more!
"The world needs more endeavors like this." —Flavorwire
Find out who taught Ernest Hemingway to thumb-wrestle, and more! Frequencies Volume 3
a collection of essays by
Antonia Crane, D. Foy, Lawrence Shainberg,
& more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
QUICK VIEW
Frequencies Volume 2
a collection of essays by
Sara Finnerty, Roxane Gay, Kate Zambreno, & more!
"Some of the smartest essays." —Flavorwire
Essays on issues of belonging in Black America, gay sex tourism in Thailand, Barbara Loden, and more! Frequencies Volume 2
a collection of essays by
Sara Finnerty, Roxane Gay, Kate Zambreno, & more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
QUICK VIEW
Frequencies Volume 1
a collection of essays by
Blake Butler, Joshua Cohen, Tracy Rose Keaton, & more!
"Heavy with literary weight."
—New Pages
The first installment of our journal of artful essays. Frequencies Volume 1
a collection of essays by
Blake Butler, Joshua Cohen, Tracy Rose Keaton, & more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
QUICK VIEW
Radio Iris
a novel by
Anne-Marie Kinney
"'The Office' as scripted
by Kafka."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Deals with watercooler culture in an artful and existential way, delivering an eerie allegory of our modern recession. Radio Iris
a novel by
Anne-Marie Kinney
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99“Radio Iris has a lovely, eerie, anxious quality to it. Iris's observations are funny, and the story has a dramatic otherworldly payoff that is unexpected and triumphant.”
—Deb Olin Unferth, New York Times Book Review, Editors' ChoiceRadio Iris is the story of Iris Finch, a socially awkward daydreamer with a job as the receptionist/personal assistant to an eccentric and increasingly absent businessman. When Iris is not sitting behind her desk waiting for the phone to ring, she makes occasional stabs at connection with the earth and the people around her through careful observation and insomniac daydreams, always more watcher than participant as she shuttles between her one-bedroom apartment and the office she inhabits so completely, yet has never quite understood.
Her world cracks open with the discovery of “the man next door.” Over the next few weeks or months (the passage of time is iffy for Iris), she takes it upon herself to learn everything she can about this stranger. But the closer she gets to him, the more troubling questions at the heart of her own life rise to the surface, questions like—Why does she keep having the same dream? Why is it that she and her brother don’t seem to have a single shared memory of their childhood? What is it her boss actually does? In the end, Iris is faced with a choice she never imagined, and a reality she never knew enough to dread. -
QUICK VIEW
Baby Geisha
a collection of stories by
Trinie Dalton
Los Angeles Magazine Critic's Pick
"Half ingenious, and half-wily, winningly hard to pin down."
—Bookforum
Eye-popping stories that showcase an assured and stylish talent. -
QUICK VIEW
The Correspondence Artist
a novel by
Barbara Browning
Winner: Lambda Literary Award
"A deft look at modern life that's both witty and devastating."
—Nylon
Sure to delight fans of Chris Krause and Charlie Kaufman. The Correspondence Artist
a novel by
Barbara Browning
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Lambda Literary Award Winner
In The Correspondence Artist, an unremarkable woman has been carrying on with an internationally recognized artist, largely via e-mail. To protect her paramour's identity, she creates a series of correspondent, alternative lovers in a self-destructing roman à clef.
-
QUICK VIEW
The Orange Eats Creeps New Classics Edition (FORTHCOMING)
a novel by
Grace Krilanovich
A Best Book of 2010
"Krilanovich's work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins." —Rachel Syme, NPR
National Book Foundation '5 Under 35' Award
Coming Soon! The Orange Eats Creeps New Classics Edition (FORTHCOMING)
a novel by
Grace Krilanovich
$ 10.99View full product details →Mary Harron, director of American Psycho, announces plans to adapt The Orange Eat Creeps to film!
*National Book Foundation '5 Under 35' Award
*NPR Best Books of 2010
*The Believer Book Award Finalist
*Indie Bookseller's Choice Awards FinalistA girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister along “The Highway That Eats People,” stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks’ “Bob” and the Green River Killer, known as Dactyl.
-
QUICK VIEW
I Smile Back
a novel by
Amy Koppelman
"Explores with ruthless honesty a woman come undone."
—Bookslut
Now a major motion picture starring Sarah Silverman and Josh Charles! -
QUICK VIEW
Backlist Bangers
Choose 12 select backlist titles for $100!
For many backlist titles, after the initial enthusiasm and support, we're left with copies. Rather than sitting in boxes, we want the books out in the world, being discovered, shared, and enjoyed by readers! Rather than sitting in boxes in storage, we want the books out there in the world, being discovered, shared, and enjoyed by readers!
Be the first to know! Click to visit the Newsletters page to sign up for the Two Dollar Radio newsletters.
Hi there!
Latest posts
-
Zachary Pace in Columbus, Ohio
Introduction by Brett Gregory: Zachary Pace is the author of I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am. This book is special. It's accessible and informative, yes, but it's... Read more →
-
Q+A with Zachary Pace about I Sing to Use the Waiting
On January 23, 2024, we're thrilled to release Zachary Pace's debut book, I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am. With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear... Read more →
-
Q+A with Christine Lai about Landscapes
We're tremendously excited to share the news that on September 12, 2023, we will be publishing Landscapes, a debut novel by Christine Lai that brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.In the English... Read more →
About Us Acclaim Books-All Books-Coming Soon Books-Ebooks Book Flowchart Books-Frequencies Books-New Releases Catalog Contact Events Films-All Films-Coming Soon Login Radio Waves Blog Rights & Distribution Rights-Film/TV Sales! Search Shopping Cart Site Map Street Team Submissions Tattoo Club
Copyright © 2024 Two Dollar Radio. All Rights Reserved.
Original website art by John Gagliano.