Two Dollar Radio—2017 Fall/Winter Rights Guide

“As much a literary movement as a publishing company.” —Publishers Weekly

Two Dollar Radio BOOKS TOO LOUD TO IGNORE. Fall/Winter 2017

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.

Eric Obenauf Publisher/Editorial Director/Rights/Publicity eric@twodollarradio.com Eliza Wood-Obenauf Director of Brand/Copy Chief elizajane@twodollarradio.com Brett Gregory Production & Marketing Assistant brett@twodollarradio.com Haley Cowans Editorial Assistant

141 East Town St., Suite 200 Columbus, OH 43215 740-504-7456 TwoDollarRadio.com

Frontlist

THEY CAN’T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US essays by Hanif Abdurraqib Literary Collection | Essays Trade Paper Original, Gatefold 978-1-937512-65-1 US $15.99, NOVEMBER 2017 5.5” x 7.5”, 222 pages

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Like Greil Marcus before him, when Abdurraqib is writing about music, what he is really getting at is the true nature of life and death in America, in this moment. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is the book I have been waiting for; it is the book we need. —Jessica Hopper

A columnist at MTV, Willis-Abdurraqib uses music 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.

Synopsis In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-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, Willis-Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill is gripping, immediate, and soul-stirring.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

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Abdurraqib bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy. —Terrance Hayes

HANIF ABDURRAQIB is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism has been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New York Times, and MTV News, where is a columnist. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was published in 2016 by Button Poetry.

An excerpt from They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us hen I see people talk about diversity in film rooms and writing rooms, I often see numbers and percentages, but not often very plain talk about what the repercussions are when no black people are present. Of the core team that created and brought Nina to life, there is only one black person: The film’s co-star, David Oyelowo, is one of the executive producers. Nina Simone’s blackness—not just her politics rooted in it, but her aesthetic blackness—is not a footnote. The fact that no one in the room was able to point this out serves as this film’s undoing before it is even released.

Because Nina Simone unlocked a part of my imagination that I have always returned to, I hoped the story of Nina Simone to be one that was larger than life, because that is what she has always been for me. I wanted to hear folklore, a story of a great black woman surviving violence through more violence, driven by her incredible gifts. This movie may do everything that we are assuming it won’t. But if it doesn’t, here is the story I hope we tell: Nina Simone’s blackness didn’t wash off at the end of a day. Nina Simone sang “Sinnerman” for 10 minutes in 1965, and the whole earth trembled. Nina Simone played the piano like she was cocking a gun. Nina Simone was dark, and beautiful, and her hair piled high to heaven. Nina Simone survived what she could of the civil rights era, and then got the fuck out. Nina Simone rode away on the troubled ocean, standing on the deck of a black ship, looking back while a whole country burned, swallowing itself. ■

W

Frontlist

FOUND AUDIO novel by N.J. Campbell Literary Fiction | Mystery | Noir | Thriller | Adventure Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-57-6 US $14.99, JULY 2017 5.5” x 7.5”, 162 pages

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A page-turner, an onion peel of a story surrounding nothing less than the central questions of human existence. The reader is led down a rabbit hole and back out again, confused, afraid, but nevertheless also ever so slightly amused. This is a weird little book full of momentum, intrigue, and weighty ideas to mull over. —Publishers Weekly

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A wicked metafictional mystery [and] dizzying epistolary novel about dreams, perception, and the human psyche. —Kirkus Reviews The novel is genius... simple, spare, and amazingly effective.

—Foreword Reviews Amid the static of contemporary literature can be heard blips of fictionfuture in N.J. Campbell’s defiantly bold Found Audio. —Steve Erickson N.J. Campbell’s Found Audio is a wild, wonderful creature: part Borges, part VanderMeer, part forgotten ‘70s psychedelic action movie. Convincing, complex, and emotionally resonant—this is a book not to be missed.

—Christian Kiefer

For the first time ever, Found Audio presents a complete transcription of the unsettling audio recordings of a mysterious unnamed adventure journalist and his decades-long pursuit of the Borgesian “City of Dreams,” alongside analysis from audio expert, Amrapali Anna Singh.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Synopsis Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.

On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling “City of Dreams.� Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?

Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.

N.J. CAMPBELL was born in the Midwest. He has won the Little Tokyo Short Story Contest, received accolades from the California State Legislature, and has been anthologized in the collection American Fiction from New Rivers Press.

Found Audio is his first novel.

An excerpt from Found Audio

O

f course, I always listened for strange things in my journalist friends’ stories, but nothing ever grabbed my interest. In general, nothing about the experience stayed with me, except my interest in slightly stranger stories. I was the guy that would go spend six weeks in silence in the company of Carthusian monks to write about their absolutely quiet lives. Lives they lived behind thick abbey walls and lifetime vows of silence. Or the guy that would spend a week alone in a supposedly haunted Irish castle. Or the guy that would opt for taking a vision quest in New Guinea. Before, it had been more about the people in a different way. Now, it was more about their experience, and not just their experience from the outside, but their experience from the inside. I tried as best as I could to write about what I had lived, rather than what I saw was being lived.

And it’s a fussy distinction, maybe a useless one, but it was slightly different from the way I had approached my job before.

And then, I was at a market in Turkmenistan meeting up with Julien. It was outside of Ashgabat and there were dozens of vendors. There were rugs—so many rugs—of all shapes and sizes in rich, dark colors laid over sofas and chairs and tents. And between these almost endless displays of dyed and colored wool lay empty square lots of rusted car parts, herbal tea merchants, grocers, livestock and kebabs of yogurt and meat. It was a bright, hot day and there were droves of people out.

We met for coffee at a makeshift café that had refrigerator boxes draped in bright linens for tables and wood crates spray painted black for seating. He was on his way to visit the Darvaza gas crater, also known as the ‘Door To The Abyss,’ and I had just finished spending a month traveling with a nomadic herding community learning about their millennia old, ritualistic style of horsemanship for a breeding magazine. This kind of curiosity assignment was less and less Julien’s thing. He was focusing more on human interest pieces, but he knew I had been growing a reputation for the exact type of thing he was getting out of. The type of thing he had tipped me off about with the swamp. And while I listened to him fret about his assignment, he offhandedly mentioned something interesting.

He said, ‘It’s like chasing the City of Dreams—the reader always expects more intrigue than is actually there.’

I asked him what he meant.

‘It’s a mirage. The burning pit in the middle of nowhere that’s been burning for over twenty years is just that—a burning pit fueled by natural gas deposits,

confirmed by a new series of geological surveys that state the fossil fuel rich soil will continue to burn for many more decades into the future—not that it is, or is anything remotely close to being, in fact, the Gates of Hell,’ he went on.

‘No,’ I said, ‘what do you mean by chasing the City of Dreams?’

‘C’mon, you’ve been doing this type of thing now longer than I have. This is exactly up your alley. You really haven’t heard of this?’ he said, expecting me to laugh, but instead I just stared at him, waiting for him to go on.

‘The City of Dreams,’ he said, ‘is an old myth in journalism. You really haven’t heard of this?’ he asked, emphasizing the ‘you’ with a capital ‘Y’ in his voice.

Whatever he was talking about, for whatever reason, struck me in a very odd way. My interest was inherent, instinctive, like a dog with a bone that keeps gnawing and gnawing until the bone is nothing but splinters in its mouth. At the time, I racked my brains for anything I could remember having read in newspapers or books or magazines—or overheard in passing conversations, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing. My memory was empty, blank.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I really haven’t—now tell me more.’

‘The City Of Dreams,’ he said, ‘is a myth in journalism that connects loose statements about dreams in relationship to a place from various historical sources. Dr. Livingstone’s journal contains a passage about a ‘Plateau of Dreams’ in relationship to cannibals he heard about in the mountains of Burundi. Napoleon’s field notes mention a ‘Caravan of Dreams’ in the heavy rain outside of Genappe before the battle of Waterloo. Cortés is fabled to have told a story to the King of Spain about a merchant in Tlaxcala who had been to the ‘Festival of Dreams.’ The list goes on. Even the Egyptians have hieroglyphs that can be translated as the ‘City of Sleeping Worlds.’ The point is, it’s a myth—a mirage in the margins of conjecture and hearsay. People want it to be real, want it to be true, so they imagine they hear things about it or connect events or source materials to one another in selective or specific ways. Dr. Livingstone was in a malaria fever for most of his time in Africa. Napoleon could have been writing about his dreams the night before Waterloo. Cortés could have been embellishing a bedtime story for the Emperor of the New World—the hieroglyphs could just as easily be interpreted as talking about death, as the Egyptians were most of the time anyway. You get the point—it’s not real, it’s a dream.’

‘Of course,’ I said, finished my coffee and paid for the both of us while I told him I had found it an interesting story. Then, before I left, I thought to ask him if he had spoken to Bianca. He said that he had, and I asked how she was doing.

He seemed nervous and said that she was doing well. I understood, or thought I did, and said that if I should come up, to let her know that I said hello. He knew how hard the break-up was on both of us, and I assumed he didn’t want to bring

up anything painful. I would have asked him to say more—I would have asked him to say that I missed her warm, soft smell in the bed beside me, her turquoise and ruby jewelry on the windowsill or the way she’d run two fingers down the side of my neck every time we’d meet—but you can’t ask that kind of thing. You can’t really say any of that to a mutual friend. It’s not fair, not to anyone. So, I told him it was good to see him and left the café.

The rest of the day before my flight, I thought about the swamp again. And, again, I forgot about it, the City of Dreams and everything that wasn’t my current assignment, until I was called to the Walled City of Kowloon before its destruction in ’93. ■

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Frontlist

PALACES novel by Simon Jacobs Literary Fiction | Mystery | Horror Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-55-2 US $15.99, JANUARY 2018 5.5” x 7.5”, 242 pages

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.

SIMON JACOBS is the author of Saturn, a collection of David Bowie stories, and of Masterworks, a short story collection. His other fiction has appeared in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, Joyland, and Paper Darts. He lives in New York City. Palaces is his first novel.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Frontlist

SEEING PEOPLE OFF novel by Jana Beňová

translated by Janet Livingstone Literary Fiction | Translation Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-59-0 US $14.99, MAY 2017 5.5” x 7.5”, 126 pages

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A fascinating novel. Fans of inwardlooking postmodernists like Clarice Lispector will find much to admire here. —NPR Winner of the EU Prize for Literature, Seeing People Off is the English-language debut of a dazzling contemporary female voice.

Synopsis There 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 postsocialist realities, and Elza’s attraction to actor Kalisto Tanzi, Seeing People Off is a kaleidoscopic, poetic, and deeply funny portrait of a relationship.

JANA BEŇOVÁ is one of the most acclaimed Slovak writers, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.

She is the author of the novels Seeing People Off, Get Off! Get Off!, Parker, and Honeymoon (forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio), as well as three collections of poems.

Rights held: World English, Film/TV, Audio

Frontlist

THE VINE THAT ATE THE SOUTH novel by J.D. Wilkes Literary Fiction | Adventure | Horror Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-55-2 US $15.99, MARCH 2017 5.5” x 7.5”, 208 pages, 13 B&W Illustrations

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A relentlessly fun novel, the literary equivalent of a country-punk album that grabs you and refuses to let go. Undeniably one of the smartest, most original Southern Gothic novels to come along in years. —NPR

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A sly, rollicking Southern phantasmagoria that finds the sweet spot between tall tale and something more dangerous and psychological.

Hilarious, profane, entertaining, and sneakily written. The illustrations are brilliant, too. —Jeff VanderMeer

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Kentuckians Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Depp would be cackling to beat the devil over this brazen tribute to folklore, tradition, and hillbilly rituals. —Kirkus Reviews The Debut Novel by the Frontman of Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers

J.D. WILKES is a visual artist, musician, author, filmmaker, and Kentucky Colonel, perhaps best known as the charismatic frontman for Th’Legendary Shack Shakers, a band that has been described as a “dynamite group” by Stephen King, and whose music has been featured on the Grammy-nominated soundtrack for HBO’s TrueBlood.

Rights held: World, Film/TV Rights sold: Audio

Synopsis

With the energy, wit, and singularity of vision that have earned him a reputation as a celebrated and charismatic musician, The Vine That Ate the South announces J.D. Wilkes as an accomplished storyteller on a surreal, Homeric voyage that strikes at the very heart of American mythology.

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as “The Deadening,” where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice—the one and only, Carver Canute—set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine. Their quest leads them face to face with albino panthers, Great Dane-riding girls, protective property owners, and just about every American folk-demon ever, while forcing the protagonist to finally take stock of his relationship with his father and the man’s mysterious disappearance.

The Vine That Ate the South is a mesmerizing fantasia where Wilkes ambitiously grapples with the contradictions of the contemporary American South while subversively considering how well we know our own family and friends.

Rudolph Wurlitzer

THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER novel by Rudolph Wurlitzer Literary Fiction | Adventure | Western Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-61-3 US $15.99, MARCH 2017 5.5” x 7.5”, 252 pages

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One of the most interesting voices in American fiction. —Rolling Stone

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A picaresque American Book of the Dead... in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern.

—Los Angeles Times

The most hallucinogenic Western you’ll ever catch in the movie house of your mind’s eye. What results is a genre farce with oracular power—a Queen of Hearts sutra, a court jester’s Blood Meridian. With Drop Edge, Wurlitzer has considerably raised the stakes.

—Bookforum

Published to international acclaim, Wurlitzer’s first novel in a quarter-century became an instant counter-cultural classic and returns to print a handsome new edition.

RUDOLPH WURLITZER is the author of Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and a non-fiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places. He has written numerous screenplays, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, and Walker.

Rights held: World, Film/TV Rights sold: French (Christian Bourgois Editeur), German (Residenz Verlag), Spanish (Tropo Editions), Audio

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[A] psychedelic adventure... Ruminative and rip-roaring at once.

—Entertainment Weekly An epic Western that merges the unique narrative invention of [Wurlitzer’s] early novels with the cinematic drift of his best scripts.

—Dazed & Confused

Synopsis The Drop Edge of Yonder is an adventurous book that explores the truth and temptations of the American myth.

Beginning in the savage wilds of Colorado in the waning days of the fur trade, the story follows Zebulon Shook, a mountain man who has had a curse placed on him by a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he murdered. The book follows Zebulon as he encounters people obsessed with greed and the politics of expansion. The trail takes him from Colorado to the remote reaches of the Northwest, a journey that traverses the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields.

Far from being simply a “western,” The Drop Edge of Yonder focuses on a time that could be considered the starting point of American capitalism and expansionism, and has led Judith Thurman to refer to the book as “a subversive modern novel about the bounds of love and the discontents of civilized life.”

The Drop Edge of Yonder originated as a screenplay treatment that intrigued Hollywood folk such as Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, Yves Simeneau, Jim Jarmusch, Roger Spotiswoode, Alex Cox, and Richard Gere, before being adapted and expanded into this original novel by Wurlitzer.

Rights held: World, Film/TV Rights sold: French (Christian Bourgois Editeur), German (Residenz Verlag), Spanish (Tropo Editions), Audio

Rudolph Wurlitzer

NOG novel by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Literary Fiction | Classic | Acid Western Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9820151-2-4 US $15.50, SEPTEMBER 2009 5.5” x 7.5”, 162 pages

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[Nog’s] combo of Samuel Beckett syntax and hippie-era freakiness mapped out new literary territory for generations to come.

—Time Out New York

Part quest novel, part Western, part artifact of late-’60s acid culture” follows a man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than three pencil-thin memories and an octupus in a bathysphere.

Rights held: World Rights sold: Spanish (Underwood Editions), Audio FLATS/QUAKE two novels by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Literary Fiction | Dystopian Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9820151-4-8 US $17, OCTOBER 2009 5.5” x 7.5”, 270 pages

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Push aside Brautigan and Ginsberg and make room in the curriculum for Wurlitzer as an overlooked and undervalued voice of the counterculture. —Pop Matters

Two classics of the counter-culture, Quake chronicles the unraveling of society after an earthquake strikes ’60s Los Angeles, while Flats is a post-apocalyptic exploration of the human self.

Rights held: World, Audio

Joshua Mohr

SIRENS memoir by Joshua Mohr Memoir | Biography Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-34-7 US $15.99, JANUARY 2017 5.5” x 7.5”, 192 pages

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Raw-edged and whippet-thin, Sirens swings from tales of bawdy addiction to charged moments of a father struggling to stay clean.

Mohr’s prose is lean and scrappy—a featherweight boxer that packs a punch. —Los Angeles Times

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The book feels incredibly alive. The prose moves fast. In Sirens, the fight is for Mohr’s life, and it’s real. —San Francisco Chronicle With the vulnerability and grit for which he’s been praised, Mohr returns with a raw and big-hearted chronicle of substance abuse, relapse, and family compassion.

acclaimed novelist Joshua

Synopsis Sirens provides a harrowing and complicated account of Mohr’s years of substance abuse and culpability. Employing the characterization and chimerical prose for which he has been lauded, Mohr leaves no rock from his sordid past un-turned, from his childhood swilling fuzzy navels as a latch-key kid, through the black-outs and fist-fights, his first failed marriage to his path to sobriety, through the birth of his daughter and the three strokes he suffers in his thirties that reveal he has a literal hole in his heart.

Sirens is a spectacularly moving tome of honesty and emotion from one of our most gifted contemporary writers.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Joshua Mohr

SOME THINGS THAT MEANT THE WORLD TO ME novel by Joshua Mohr Literary Fiction | Family Drama Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9820151-1-7 US $15.99, MAY 2009 5.5” x 7.5”, 208pages

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Charles Bukowski fans will dig the grit in this seedy novel, a poetic rendering of postmodern San Francisco.

—O, The Oprah Magazine

A young man suffering from depersonalization, Rhonda, discovers a trapdoor in the bottom of a dumpster that forces him to confront his troubled childhood.

Rights held: World, Film/TV Rights sold: Italian (Eliot Edizioni), Audio DAMASCUS novel by Joshua Mohr

Literary Fiction Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9826848-9-4 US $16, OCTOBER 2011 5.5” x 7.5”, 224 pages

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Damascus succeeds in conveying a bighearted vision. —Wall Street Journal Beat-poet cool. —New York Times Book Review

Gracefully tackling cancer, the Iraq War, and self-esteem, Damascus is Mohr’s most ambitious and accomplished novel to date.

Rights held: World, Film/TV Rights sold: Audio

Highlights

THE ORANGE EATS CREEPS novel by Grace Krilanovich Literary Fiction | Horror Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9820151-8-6 US $16, SEPT 2010 5.5” x 7.5”, 192 pages

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The book feels written in a fever; it is breathless, scary, and like nothing I’ve ever read before. Krilanovich’s work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins. —NPR

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A steamy cesspool of language that stews psychoneurosis and viscera into a horrific new organism—the sort of muck in which Burroughs, Bataille, and Kathy Acker loved to writhe. —The Believer National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ Award NPR Best Books of 2010 The Believer Book Award Finalist

Synopsis The most brazen and memorable contemporary American debut, following a 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.

Rights held: World Rights sold: Film/TV (Mary Harron, Greencard Productions), Audio

Highlights

CRAPALACHIA memoir by Scott McClanahan Literary Fiction | Memoir | Biography Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-03-3 US $16, APRIL 2013 5.5” x 7.5”, 172 pages

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[McClanahan] aims to lasso the moon. The man has purpose. This is his symphony, every note designed to resonate, to linger.

—New York Times Book Review

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Crapalachia is the genuine article: intelligent, atmospheric, raucously funny and utterly wrenching. —Washington Post [Crapalachia is] a wild and inventive book, unquestionably fresh of spirit, and totally unafraid to break formalisms to tell it like it was. —VICE An endearing and haunting coming-of-age story Scott McClanahan as a resounding talent.

that announced

Synopsis 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.

Rights held: World Rights sold: Audio, French (Editions Cambourakis)

Highlights

HOW TO GET INTO THE TWIN PALMS novel by Karolina Waclawiak

Literary Fiction | Comedy Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9832471-8-0 US $16, JULY 2012 5.5” x 7.5”, 192 pages

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Reinvents the immigration story.

—New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice Anya is a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in L.A., torn between her parents’ Polish heritage and trying to assimilate in the U.S. She decides instead to try to assimilate in her Russian neighborhood, embodied by the nightclub, the Twin Palms.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio THE ABSOLUTION OF ROBERTO ACESTES LAING novel by Nicholas Rombes

Literary Fiction | Noir | Mystery Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-23-1 US $15.99, NOVEMBER 2014 5.5” x 7.5”, 162 pages

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Kafka directed by David Lynch doesn’t even come close. —3:AM Magazine In the mid-’90s a rare-film librarian at a state university in Pennsylvania mysteriously burned his entire stockpile of film canisters and disappeared. Years later, a journalist tracks the librarian down, to find out what movies were burned, and why.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Highlights

CRYSTAL EATERS novel by Shane Jones

Literary Fiction | Sci-Fi | Family Drama Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-18-7 US $16, JUNE 2014 5.5” x 7.5”, 168 pages

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Jones demonstrates a tightrope-like eye for finagling between Pynchonesque quasi-science-fictional feelings and the book’s physics, allowing almost anything to happen at any time, wrapped in a Wallace-like grip of childlike awe. —VICE

Remy is a young girl living in a town that believes in crystal count. When her mother becomes sick, she sets out to accomplish what no one else has, and increase her mother’s crystal count.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio THE CORRESPONDENCE ARTIST novel by Barbara Browning Literary Fiction | Comedy Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9820151-9-3 US $15.99, MARCH 2011 5.5” x 7.5”, 192 pages

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Both witty and devastating. —Nylon

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 selfdestructing roman à clef.

Rights held: World, Film/TV Audio

Highlights

ANCIENT OCEANS OF CENTRAL KENTUCKY novel by David Connerley Nahm

Literary Fiction | Thriller | Mystery Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-20-0 US $16, AUGUST 2014 5.5” x 7.5”, 192 pages

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Deeply suspenseful... it’s impossible to stop reading until you’ve gone through each beautiful line. —NPR 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.

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

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio SQUARE WAVE novel by Mark de Silva

Literary Fiction | Crime | Mystery Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-39-2 US $17.99, FEBRUARY 2017 5.5” x 7.5”, 384 pages

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Compelling and horrifying.

—Chicago Tribune

A grand novel of ideas and compelling crime mystery, about security states past and present, weather modification, and imperial influences.

Rights held: World English

Highlights

I SMILE BACK novel by Amy Koppelman

Literary Fiction | Family Drama Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9763895-9-0 US $15, DECEMBER 2008 5.5” x 7.5”, 194 pages

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Powerful. Koppelman’s instincts help her navigate these choppy waters with inventiveness and integrity.

—Los Angeles Times

Now a major motion picture starring Sarah Silverman, I Smile Back “explores with ruthless honesty a woman come undone.”

Rights held: World Rights sold: Italian (Safara Editore), Audio THE GLACIER novel by Jeff Wood

Literary Fiction Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-41-5 US $15.95, SEPTEMBER 2016 5.5” x 7.5”, 220 pages

“

Gorgeously and urgently written.

—Library Journal, starred

A brilliant and visceral cinematic novel about authenticity and the American condition, following a cater-waiter, a surveying crew, and a poet living in a storage unit.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Highlights

MADE TO BREAK novel by D. Foy

Literary Fiction | Thriller Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-16-3 US $16, MARCH 2014 5.5” x 7.5”, 218 pages

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Literary, cinematic. —The Daily Beast

Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. 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.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio NOTHING novel by Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon

Literary Fiction | Mystery Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-11-8 US $16, NOVEMBER 2013 5.5” x 7.5”, 187 pages

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Apocalyptic and psychologically attentive. —New York Times Book Review Epic wildfires are snaking through the Missoula valley as James hitchhikes into town in search of clues to his father’s mysterious death two decades earlier. What he finds instead are Ruth and Bridget, two Frenemies on a dangerous path.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Highlights

BABY GEISHA stories by Trinie Dalton

Literary Fiction | Stories Trade Paper Original, 978-0-9832471-0-4 US $16, DECEMBER 2008 5.5” x 7.5”, 144 pages

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Half ingenious, half wily, and winningly hard to pin down.

—Bookforum

Thirteen sexually-charged stories that roam from the Coney Island Ferris wheel to the Greek Isles that underline Dalton’s reputation as a remarkable stylist and original artist.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

THE PEOPLE WHO WATCHED HER PASS BY novel by Scott Bradfield Literary Fiction Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-41-5 US $15.95, SEPTEMBER 2016 5.5” x 7.5”, 220 pages

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Brave and unforgettable.

—Los Angeles Times A billowy adventure of a book.

—New York Times Book Review

A philosophical road novel told from the vantage point of a 4-year-old girl.

Rights held: World, Audio Rights sold: German (Residenz Verlag)

Highlights

NOT DARK YET novel by Berit Ellingsen

Literary Fiction | Sci-Fi Trade Paper Original, 978-1-937512-16-3 US $16, MARCH 2014 5.5” x 7.5”, 218 pages

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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. —BuzzFeed A rich character-driven drama, addressing questions of personal morals and societal ethics, set on the cusp of a self-inflicted apocalypse.

Rights held: World, Film/TV, Audio

Rights and publicity queries: ERIC OBENAUF eric@twodollarradio.com 740-504-7456 French:

German:

Italian:

LA NOUVELLE AGENCE Anne Maizeret anne@lanouvelleagence.fr AGENTUR BRAUER Oliver Brauer brauer@agentur-brauer.de CLEMENTINA LIUZZI LITERARY Clementina Liuzzi clementina@litag.it

Spanish and Portugese: INTERNATIONAL EDITORS’ CO. Amaiur Fernandez amaiur.fernandez@internationaleditors.com Turkish:

Film/TV:

ANATOLIA LIT Amy Spangler amy@anatolialit.com

THE GOTHAM GROUP Nate Matteson + Eddie Gamarra ph: 310-285-0001

“They are delivering so much genuinely exciting fiction that they make it look easy.”

Los Angeles Times

“Publisher of some of the best gritty Americana novels of the past decade.”

The Atlantic

“As much known for their ability to curate boundarypushing writers as they are for their DIY aesthetic.”

Bustle

“Aesthetically consistent, editorially adventurous, and manageably tiny.”

Village Voice

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