NEW TEE SHIRTS, NOW AVAILABLE

A few weeks ago we came up with several new tee shirt designs that we think are pretty rad, but which we didn't formally announce much.

This is to say that we now have new tee shirt designs up on our website for sale.

Douglas Rushkoff Discusses Publishing Future

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

It's nice to have your existence validated first thing in the morning by Douglas Rushkoff:

"...there have been efforts to expand the very definition of a “book” into something more interactive and mutable - something more like TV and movies - but this in itself is not practical. “Books are less liquid, viral and recombinant,” says Rushkoff. “Text is pretty straight up and down, books are lopped off. They are live media, but they are static — the ink is set, the tree has been killed, like the Bible, they have been redacted. Books are a complete, self-contained experience.”

"He advocates that publishers form small elite teams to do focused, limited lists of books."

Check out the complete article at Publishing Perspectives: http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=1131

Rudolph Wurlitzer reads from NOG @ 192 Books - 5/28/09

Bookforum excerpts Xiao's THE CAVE MAN.

The summer issue of Bookforum is out now with a special section called 'Fiction Forward' that spotlights work from forthcoming novels or story collections by young or emerging writers.

We're really proud to have a novel that we're publishing this December, called The Cave Man, by a talented writer named Xiaoda Xiao, included in the issue.

We're equally elated to have Jay Neugeboren (1940) write the introduction to the excerpt:

"Xiaoda Xiao, author of The Cave Man (Two Dollar Radio), emigrated from China to the United States in the spring of 1988, shortly before the breakout of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, leaving his wife behind; it would be two years before they would be allowed to reunite. He came from Suzhou and arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts, where it was my good fortune to become his teacher and friend. Xiao is—no hyperbole here—an extraordinarily gifted man: a concert violinist, a Ping-Pong champion, a trained architect, an inventor (with patents on file and products in the marketplace), a master chef, a music teacher, and a widely published writer (in China; this is his debut in the United States). He is also a survivor of seven years of forced labor on an island in Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province, where he served in one of Mao’s infamous prison labor-reform brigades. In The Cave Man, Xiao displays a splendid voice, one all his own. Like Solzhenitsyn, he has transformed his camp experience into sublimely vivid fiction. And like Kafka, Xiao memorably conjures a mad, surreal world, along with its potential both for cruelty and for kindness. In Ja Feng, Xiao’s protagonist, we have a man, released from solitary confinement, who must now make sense of ordinary life, which turns out to be at least as surreal and terrifying as the prison that was long his home. A masterful storyteller, Xiao offers us a gorgeously crafted, haunting tale rich in narrative invention as well as character. The Cave Man is as luminous as it is severe, and it will have a transformative effect on those fortunate enough to read it."

The entire excerpt is available online: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_02/3883

NOG Posters (not for sale).

Michael Silverblatt Interviews Gary Indiana.

Wow. Silverblatt praises Gary Indiana about his writing and new novel, The Shanghai Gesture, on KCRW's Bookworm today.

Consider:

"[Gary Indiana] is the primary reporter of the underground, the dissociation of cultures, the new behaviors; there is a sense that if you want to understand what has happened in America, you would have to read Gary Indiana. And this newest book is a leap forward."

Follow the link to listen to the rest...

Indiana on Silverblatt's Bookworm

"Out of fantasias of the past (Fu Manchu novels, exotic Hollywood films, documents of "friendly" imperialism from the twenties to the forties), Gary Indiana concocts the nightmare present of The Shanghai Gesture, a book that takes the current fashion for apocalyptic dystopias to unprecedented levels of fear and loathing."

Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm radio show, has interviewed Gary Indiana on his new novel. The interview will air on May 14. You can listen to the show streaming on the web, or download as a podcast shortly thereafter.

Village Voice: The Unlikely Triumph of Two Dollar Radio

"Technically, the small, Ohio-based imprint Two Dollar Radio got its start after a 2003 cross-country car ride, during which fellow NYU graduates Eric Obenauf and Eliza Jane Wood accidentally fell in love. But the independent press really became what it is today on a lower level of Philip Glass's East Village townhouse, where Obenauf came one day in 2006 to court the author Rudolph Wurlitzer. Wurlitzer—a sometime screenwriter (Two-Lane Blacktop) who made his reputation in the literary world with his psychedelic 1969 debut, Nog—was looking for a publisher. Obenauf had just become one..."

New Spring/Summer 2009 Catalog Online

Two Dollar Twitter

We finally broke down and joined Twitter.

[Long sigh.]

The Shanghai Gesture Now Available as a Serialized Audio Book From BOMB & AIR

An Audio Book of Gary Indiana reading from his first novel since 2003's Do Everything In The Dark, The Shanghai Gesture, is now available as a podcast from BOMB Magazine and Art International Radio.

Shanghai Gesture a Village Voice 'Spring Book Pick'

The Shanghai Gesture, a novel by Gary Indiana (April), was selected by the Village Voice as a "Spring Book Pick."

They say:

"This enormously playful seventh novel from Gary Indiana is a riff on Sax Rohmer's infamously effeminate and evil villain, Fu Manchu, and the two "medicament"-addicted Sherlock Holmes types who attempt to stop him. The sarcastic, unyielding fury that permeated last year's criticism collection Utopia's Debris is here, too, but sublimated: Narcolepsy, an astonishingly degraded Holiday Inn, and a ship called The Ardent Somdomite feature prominently."

Some Things That Meant the World to Me -- Starred Review

Joshua Mohr's first review for his first novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me (we'll be releasing his second novel June 2010), is a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Here's a snippet:

"Mohr's first novel is biting and heartbreaking, a piercing look at the indelible scars a violent past has left on a young man named Rhonda. The disturbing narrative engine - Rhonda's renaming and reimagining of the world around him to fit into his damaged logic - keeps the story creepily moving as it touches on homebrew prison wine and Rhonda's friendship with his childhood self, little-Rhonda. Mohr uses punchy, tightly wound prose to pull readers into a nightmarish landscape, but he never loses the heart of his story; it's as touching as it is shocking."

Erotomania's Spanish Cover.

Erotomania: A Romance is to be published in Spain by Tusquets Editores.

2 ForeWord Book of the Year Finalists.

1940, by Jay Neugeboren, is a finalist for historical fiction in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards.

The Drop Edge of Yonder, by Rudolph Wurlitzer, is a finalist for literary fiction in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards.

Winners will be announced at Book Expo America, late-May. Stay tuned...

James Gibbons Hits Nail on Head in Bookforum review of The Shanghai Gesture

James Gibbons provides a tremendously enthusiastic review of The Shanghai Gesture, by Gary Indiana, in the April / May issue of Bookforum, bestowing the book (and author) with some much-deserved praise:

"An uproarious, confounding, turbocharged fantasia that manages, alongside all its imaginative bravura, to hold up to our globalized epoch the fun-house mirror it deserves.

"This most socially astute writer has fashioned a riotous artifact that is both self-contained and self-consuming; The Shanghai Gesture is at once a wicked riposte to contemporary failings and an aesthete's hallucinatory folktale. That the writing can balance Indiana's thoroughgoing pessimism with a yarn of such imaginative buoyancy is not the least of its achievements."

The book is now available for sale through various booksellers, as well as through our website.

Drop Edge in The Believer's Top 20.

The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer was praised by readers of The Believer as one of the "strongest works of fiction published in 2008."

Apparently, once all the tabs were tabulated and all the hanging chads were swept under the doormat, they found it to be the 19th highest vote-getter.

Over at The Believer website, they have the top twenty books in the reader survey arranged, before listing what appear to be the next 30 or 40 in no apparent order.

Boom goes the dynamite.

RHONDA.

There are actually three Rhondas (that I know of) wandering the fictive literary galaxy and all three can actually be found in one book: Joshua Mohr's debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me. There is little-boy Rhonda, old-lady Rhonda, and Rhonda (a 30-year old man).

As Donald Ray Pollock mentioned in his blurb for the book, "[Rhonda] is one of the most troubled and heartbreaking people you will ever encounter in literature." Though which Rhonda in particular he refers to is uncertain. Read the book and find out.

The author got the name tattooed on his arm.

New Some Things Cover.

P.S. Some Things That Meant the World to Me, the debut novel from the Joshua Mohr, is due out June 1 but is now available for pre-order through our site.

P.P.S. Check out that quote from Donald Ray Pollock!

Gary Indiana's Blog.

Gary Indiana has started a blog where he has posted a boat-load of his writing, most of which appears to be previously unpublished : stories, essays, musings, interviews, etc.

There even appears to be much/most/all of the manuscript for his forthcoming book, Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World available for your perusal.

Indiana's first novel in six years, The Shanghai Gesture, is coming your way soon...

The Rudy Wurlitzer Renaissance.

"There is something of a Rudy Wurlitzer renaissance going down in the pop culture zeitgeist; not only through the Criterion releases [Walker; Two Lane Blacktop] but also through a well-deserved re-examination of Wurlitzer's long-forgotten work as a masterful novelist."

So says Rodger Jacobs in his thoughtful interview with the author for PopMatters. Jacobs approaches some seminal works, such as the film Wurlitzer co-directed with Robert Frank, Candy Mountain, and his classic novel, Quake (which we'll be reissuing Fall '09 in a comp edition with the equally nihilistic Flats). Jacobs continues:

"[The Drop Edge of Yonder is] a rousing adventure tale that is far more compelling than any narrative the reluctant guru from Lowell, MA, could have arrived at."

The Cave Man cover

Please Help Philoctetes

Francis Levy, author of Erotomania: A Romance and our dear friend, is co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, a non-profit group housed in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. You should see their programming, there's everything from film screenings of Guy Maddin to roundtable discussions on topics as varied as 'Modernity and Waste,' from an entire afternoon on Samuel Beckett featuring Edward Albee and John Turturro, to 'The Biology of Romance.' It's wild and vital.

I'm on the Philoctetes programming email list and I regularly forward event listings to friends in the city. And, I should add, it's a great selling point as to why nothing really beats New York City: Where else would you be able to witness something such as this, with such amazing and knowledgeable panelists, first-hand, in such an intimate setting?

In a very sad turn of events:
"...the foundation that funds all activities at the Philoctetes Center held large investments with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, and the Center's capital and income source has literally vanished overnight.

"We at Philoctetes feel very strongly that we need to do all in our power to assure the survival and continued growth of the Center. Our programs not only generate interest here in New York, but our online resources serve those across the country and in other parts of the world as a unique engine for intellectual enrichment.

"In order to continue, even at a reduced level of activity, we urgently need an infusion of funds. For this reason, we are appealing to all of you who have been friends of the Center and have partaken of our activities to contribute as much as you are able. Additionally, if you know of any foundations that might be interested in supporting the activities of the Center, please contact us."

Contributions may be sent to:
The Philoctetes Center247 E. 82nd St.New York, NY 10028

Time Out New York: Drop Edge Best Book of 2008!

Michael Miller, the books editor of Time Out New York, selected The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer as #1 on his list of the Top 10 Books of 2008.

"Wurlitzer develops a dreamy, carnivalesque portrait of the American West, exploring the territory’s mythology even as he wildly entertains."

Miller has impeccably good taste, so it makes it all the more meaningful to have Drop Edge edge out his list this year.

Also worth noting, is that in addition to reissuing Wurlitzer's countercultural classic first novel, Nog, next summer with a new introduction from noted critic Erik Davis, we will be publishing Wurlitzer's second and third novels as well - Flats and Quake - in a "69ed," compilation edition shortly thereafter.

Erotomania Conversation

Erotomania: A Romance continues to win over reviewers and thwart nay-sayers.

Billy Thompson contributes some thoughtful, in-depth coverage to the December issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Thompson is clearly a Kundera fan (as is Francis Levy, I later learned), and so I take it as a positive sign that Thompson devotes so much space in comparing Erotomania (on some levels) with Identity.

"[Erotomania] can just as easily be a bookend to the beautifully nuanced prose of Milan Kundera as it can be a long-version story for a nudie mag minus the accompanying photographs. It's all in the context - as it is with most relationships."

(I've also included a full-cover shot of the book cover with this post, for the complete effect: some hot, full-body action.)

I Smile Back - Bookslut Review

There's a stellar review of I Smile Back by Erin McKnight in the December issue of Bookslut.

Finding a favorite passage was a difficult task, but here's the winner:

"Amy Koppelman explores with ruthless honesty a woman come undone. Laney remains captivating in her certainty that although her family's dissolution is her sole responsibility to deter, she can't quite conjure the necessary thwarting efforts. For the only thing as ferocious as Laney's lack of preventive action is her behavior, the reader powerless against her vice: an addict hooked to Koppelman's potent writing and her protagonist's unpredictable conduct."

Great Indiana Profile in Time Out New York

Michael Miller, in a great profile of Gary Indiana in Time Out New York in synch with the release of Indiana's new collection of essays, Utopia's Debris, says about the author:

"His nonfiction has an awe-inspiring syntax and rigorous sensibility that suggest Joan Didion’s political takedowns but have a droll power all their own, one that’s tuned in to the frequencies of art, sexual power and human folly."

Also, Arthur Nersesian has just contributed a great blurb for Indiana's first novel in six years, The Shanghai Gesture, which we'll be releasing in April '09:

"Indiana has gloriously revived an obscure Hollywood film of the same name, infused it with eroticism and intrigue - and added Dr. Fu Manchu! The result is a lustrous, laugh-out-loud world of bawd and mayhem; an erudite, charmingly operatic opium den of decadence that seesaws between high brow and low camp and reads as though Cormac McCarthy had rewritten Austin Powers."

I Smile Back - Elle + Bookforum

I Smile Back, Amy Koppelman's second novel, is due out on December 1, but the book is already garnering some really impressive reviews.

This week, from the December issue of Elle, and in the December/January issue of the always-thoughtful Bookforum.

From Elle:
"Stomach-churning... Koppelman mosly writes from inside Laney's disillusioned mind, ricocheting between the quotidian details of wife and motherhood and big-picture musings, forming exquisite stand-alone tone poems."

From Bookforum:
"Laney Brooks is a woman in agony, suffering from an undefined malady that makes standard housewife ennui—boredom from carpooling or picking up dry cleaning—look like a picnic. Laney’s despair, ably depicted by Amy Koppelman in her affecting second novel, I Smile Back, is rooted in childhood.

I Smile Back is now available in bookstores and through online retailers.

I Smile Back on Audible.com

I Smile Back, the stomach-churning new novel from Amy Koppelman (A Mouthful of Air), due out from Two Dollar Radio in December, is now available as an audio download through Audible.com as part of their "Indie First" program.

It's pretty amazing to digest the book in this way. Lauren Fortgang gives a great reading that adds an interesting dimention to Koppelman's protagonist, the dismantled Laney Brooks.

For those interested in a tangible copy, you can order the book now through online retailers, or pick one up at an independent bookstore near you.

Details Magazine: Boutique Publishers

TWO DOLLAR RADIO was picked by Timothy Hodler of Details as one of "three of the best bets" for "niche publishers that curate their lists with care and taste."

From the article:
"...this tiny upstart has already produced an impressive array of subversive fiction from former literary big-leaguers - like Rudolph Wurlitzer and Jay Neugeboren.
Try if you like: Jonathan Lethem, Cormac McCarthy."

Also profiled in the piece were Small Beer Press and Dalkey Archive, both of whom are insanely rad.

PW: No to Kindle, Yes to Object Status

In the November 2 issue of Publishers Weekly, Claire Kirch continues the ongoing discussion regarding digitalizing book content.

Kirch spotlights Crust alongside boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague, released by Featherproof Books, as examples of indie presses disregarding the translation of a book to digital format.

From the article:
"Mainstream publishers are hastening to join the digital revolution, with many formatting their digital book content to make it conform to Kindle specifications. Some houses are even making digital book content accessible via Web-enabled cellphones.

"Bucking this trend toward digitalizing book content, two independent small presses—Featherproof Books, a Chicago press founded in 2005 by a pair of Time Out Chicago staffers, and Two Dollar Radio, a Granville, Ohio-based press founded by a husband-wife team, also in 2005—insist on pursuing a more tangible aesthetic in book production. Both presses publish primarily fiction and both are adamant that the physical book itself is not just a work of art, but a highly evolved object keyed to a reader's experience—a philosophy that runs counter to the central premise behind digital access."

Nasalism Blog.

Celebrate Liberation.
Celebrate Self-Reliance.
Celebrate Invention.
Celebrate Re-Creation.
Celebrate Blogs.
Celebrate Hope.
Celebrate Crust.
Celebrate You.
Celebrate Change.
Celebrate Blogs.

Gary Indiana's Utopia's Debris

We're publishing Gary Indiana's first novel since 2003's Do Everything in the Dark, The Shanghai Gesture. This book will be out in April of 2009.

However, right now, in our present moment, "one of America's leading cultural critics" has a new collection of essays fresh out from Basic Books, called Utopia's Debris.

It sounds pretty stellar, as the author riffs on topics ranging from Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial win to Bill Clinton's autobiography, from Celine to Wurlitzer.

Yes: believe it. There is an entire chapter on the works of Rudolph Wurlitzer.

From the preface of Utopia's Debris: "We live in the wreckage of a century I lived through the second half of, a century of false messiahs, twisted ideologies, shipwrecked hopes, pathetic answers."

From Kirkus: "Indiana's thorough and balanced research coagulates into a convincing argument that the ills of the world are not natural occurrences like glaciation; there is accountability, and these people are responsible. A polychrome pastiche that soars with delicious insights."

Is Going Grody the New Edgy?

Carolyn Kellogg, the lead blogger at the Los Angeles Times' book blog, Jacket Copy, considers whether "familiar literary tropes - sex, murder, betrayal, booze, isolation, love, war, warlocks, aliens - have become too worn at the edges?" And whether "ick is the last literary frontier" to explore.

To discuss her point, Kellogg mentions the worldwide bestseller Wetlands by German author Charlotte Roche, coming stateside spring '09, and Crust, by Lawrence Shainberg.

She says, regarding Crust: "Shainberg writes of a man who changes culture by picking his nose. No matter how well the book lampoons New Age movements, I'm still grossed out by the title and the premise. Nosepicking as a central metaphor sounds ridiculous and amusing - but it also makes me go 'ewww.'"

Blog Wars: East Coast vs West Coast

Unwittingly, we stirred up some old East Coast / West Coast dust that hasn't completely settled since the days of Tupac and Notorious BIG.

In a post on his blog, Chekhov's Mistress, Bud Parr mentions his move to Tivoli, New York, and suggests that the captains of the Two Dollar Radio team uproot and move up the Hudson River as well. He did make a particularly solid and smooth delivery at the release party for Crust (attention: Tivoli Town Council).

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, in the beatific forrested mountains of south Oregon, Tod Davies, editor and publisher of the about-to-assault-the-indie-publishing-scene Extreminating Angel Press, discusses regionalism and makes a convincing (and blunt) case for a Two Dollar Radio move to the Pacific Northwest:

"...and I’ve been thinking about my publishing mentors, Two Dollar Radio, Eric and Eliza Obenauf, who keep thinking about moving their act to New York because that’s where the independent press action is. And I’m saying now, Eric and Eliza, don’t do it! Get out here to Portland! We need you out here…and PDX is a shorthop skip and a jump to Manhattan any day. Come on out, and I’ll drive up, and we’ll go to Village Books together! And then we’ll drive back and have another drink with the guys from Powell’s…"

Adding to the West Coast discussion, was Bruce Rutledge, of our pals Chin Music Press (who we're also sharing a booth with at the 2009 BEA), who offered "free babysitting services for Rio whenever the $2 folks are in Seattle."

If you have a suggested destination for us (and you aren't related by blood to us), then we'd like to hear them (if you are related by blood [mom], then we wouldn't like to hear).