All Books - - Items tagged as "Male 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.
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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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Absence (FORTHCOMING)
a novel by
Issa Quincy
July 2025!
Haunting and atmospheric, Issa Quincy’s Absence is an indelible nesting doll of human impression and memory.
Haunting and atmospheric, Issa Quincy’s Absence is an indelible nesting doll of human impression and memory.
Absence (FORTHCOMING)
a novel by
Issa Quincy
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99As we follow characters on their journeys of self-discovery through the jungle of Thailand, as a child in the British countryside, or as an aging doctor on the island of Cyprus, Absence evocatively builds a compassionate symphony of nostalgia, attuned to the drama of everyday and the phantoms that linger with us. Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating those memories that forever bind us to one another.
As we follow characters on their journeys of self-discovery through the jungle of Thailand, as a child in the British countryside, or as an aging doctor on the island of Cyprus, Absence evocatively builds a compassionate symphony of nostalgia, attuned to the drama of everyday and the phantoms that linger with us. Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating those memories that forever bind us to one another.
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What We Tried to Bury Grows Here
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. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here
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. -
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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. 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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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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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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Other Minds and Other Stories
a collection of stories by
Bennett Sims
November 2023!
“[Sims is] kind of like if Alfred Hitchcock and Brian Evenson raised a baby with David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker. Sims should be a household name in horror.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, LitHub
From the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues, a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection. Other Minds and Other Stories
a collection of stories by
Bennett Sims
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99From the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues, a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection.
A man lends his phone to a stranger in the mall, setting off an uncanny series of Unknown calls that come to haunt his relationship with jealousy and dread. A well-meaning locavore tries to butcher his backyard chickens humanely, only to find himself absorbed into the absurd violence of the pecking order. A student applying for a philosophy fellowship struggles to project himself into the thoughts of his hypothetical judges, becoming increasingly possessed and overpowered by the problem of other minds. And in “The Postcard,” a private detective is hired to investigate a posthumous message that a widower has seemingly received from his dead wife, leading him into a foggy landscape of lost memories, shifting identities, and strange doublings.
Cerebral and eerie, captivating and profound, these thirteen stories expertly guide us through the paranoia and obsession of everyday horrors, not least the horrors of overthinking what other people might be thinking. With all of Sims’s trademark virtuosity, innovation, and wit, Other Minds and Other Stories continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary fiction. -
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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.
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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.