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Two Dollar Radio Purchase with Purpose heart
The following titles are donating all or part of author proceeds to various charitable organizations.

Click on each title to see which organization is receiving funds, from IRC to Al Otro Lado.

  • Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky QUICK VIEW Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky
    A Best Book of 2014
    "It's impossible to stop reading until you've gone through each beautiful line." —NPR

    A mysterious, lyric exploration of childhood, loss, and ghost stories.

    Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

    a novel by
    David Connerley Nahm


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    (ALL AUTHOR PROCEEDS, MATCHED BY TWO DOLLAR RADIO, WILL BE DONATED TO IRC).
    *One of the Best Books of 2014  —NPR, Flavorwire
    *A Top-10 Independently-Published Title Overlooked by the National Book Foundation  —Electric Literature

    Leah’s little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears and the stories told to quell them.

    Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.

  • Made to Break QUICK VIEW Made to Break
    A Best Book of 2014
    "Reads like what we’d imagine a Stanley Kubrick rewrite of a script by Denis Johnson might look like." —Flavorwire

    A melancholic and savage look at friendship.

    Made to Break

    a novel by
    D. Foy


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    *One of the best books of 2014  —Flavorwire, Entropy Magazine

    "Made to Break, D. Foy’s debut novel, snaps. Literary, cinematic... [Foy] is a writing school of one, and Made to Break ushers his literary energies into categorical existence."
    —The Daily Beast

    Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends—three men and two women—head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. They’ve been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their relationships defined by these wild times. 

    After a car accident leaves one friend sick and dying, and severe weather traps them at the cabin, there is nowhere to go, forcing them to finally and ultimately take stock and confront their past transgressions, considering what they mean to one another and themselves. 

    With some of the most luminous and purple prose flexed in recent memory, D. Foy is an incendiary new voice and Made to Break, a grand, episodic debut, redolent of the stark conscience of Denis Johnson and the spellbinding vision of Roberto Bolaño.

  • On Hell QUICK VIEW On Hell

    "Johanna Hedva’s On Hell does what others only speculate about... [it] rearranges the components that make up our stories about how the world works, adjusts our vision."
    —Alex Gerrans, Overland


    Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.

    On Hell

    a novel by
    Johanna Hedva


    $ 5.00 $ 15.00
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    Named one of Dennis Cooper's faves of 2018.
    On Hell transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of "Sick Woman Theory," takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.

  • Palaces QUICK VIEW Palaces
    Starred reviews: Publishers Weekly, Foreword Reviews
    "Palaces is robust, both current and clairvoyant, and answers the question of what happens when our deepest fantasies become reality.—Foreword Reviews, starred review

    While exercising precision and a cool detachment, Simon Jacobs has crafted a surreal and spellbinding first novel of horror and intrigue.

    Palaces

    a novel by
    Simon Jacobs


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    John and Joey are a young couple immersed in their local midwestern punk scene, who after graduating college sever all ties and move to a perverse and nameless northeastern coastal city. They drift in and out of art museums, basement shows, and derelict squats seemingly unfazed as the city slowly slides into chaos around them.

    Late one night, forced out of their living space, John and Joey are driven to take shelter in a chain pharmacy before emerging to a city in full-scale riot. They find themselves the only passengers on a commuter train headed north, and exit at the final stop to discover the area entirely devoid of people. As John and Joey negotiate their future through bizarre, troubling manifestations of the landscape and a succession of abandoned mansions housing only scant clues to their owners' strange and sudden disappearance, they're also forced to confront the resurgent violence and buried memories of their shared past.

    With incisive precision and a cool detachment, Simon Jacobs has crafted a surreal and spellbinding first novel of horror and intrigue.

  • The Book of X QUICK VIEW The Book of X

    A Best Book of 2019
    Winner: Shirley Jackson Award for Novel

    "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."
    —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


    $ 9.99 $ 10.99
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    *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, Thrillist

    A 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.

  • The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish QUICK VIEW The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

    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


    $ 9.99 $ 10.99
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    *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.

  • They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us QUICK VIEW They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

    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


    $ 8.99 $ 9.99
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    *Best Books of 2017 —NPR, BuzzfeedPaste MagazineEsquireChicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC, Stereogum, National Post, Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot, Chicago Review of BooksThe Los Angeles ReviewMichigan Daily
    *American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads'
    *Midwest Indie Bestseller

    In 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.

Hi there!

Two Dollar Radio is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore. Check out the ABOUT US section to read more...

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