Award Winners - - Items tagged as "Poetic"
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.
The latest and greatest from Two Dollar Radio! Books are shown in 'newest to oldest' view, which you can change with the Sort option below.
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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.
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A History of My Brief Body
a collection of essays by
Billy-Ray Belcourt
A Best Book of 2020
Lambda Literary Award Finalist"[Belcourt] ably balances poetic, philosophical, and political insights throughout this unique book... An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred
For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.
A History of My Brief Body
a collection of essays by
Billy-Ray Belcourt
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 15.99* A Best Book of 2020 —Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail, Largehearted Boy.
"In sharp pieces infused with a yearning for decolonized love and freedom, Belcourt, of the Driftpile Cree Nation, ably balances poetic, philosophical, and political insights throughout this unique book... An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewThe youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place.
Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
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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.
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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. -
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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. -
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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.
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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. -
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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.