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A Questionable Shape
by Bennett Sims
$16.50, ISBN 978-1-937512-09-5, 242 pages
* ORDER FOR $16.50
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming May 2013)
"Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young
Nabokov's, Nicholson Baker's gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal of virtuosities entirely
his own. A Questionable Shape announces a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance."
-Wells Tower
Mazoch 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.
BENNETT SIMS was born and raised
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and
Zoetrope: All-Story. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently teaches fiction
at the University of Iowa, where he is a provost postgraduate visiting writer.
Additional Reviews
"Deeply thoughtful... Full of footnotes and digressions, the novel is both a dark adventure story and
a meditation on what it means when someone you love is lost to you."
-Poets & Writers
"A Questionable Shape is the best book I have read this year. I suspect it will still hold top
honors when the year comes to a close many months hence. A Questionable Shape is unquestionably
a major accomplishment."
-The Gazette
"This ain’t your granddaddy’s zombie-apocalypse. Everything in Bennett Sims’s stunning debut court
s a topographical and invasive examination of the human condition through our inverse. The architecture
of zombie-logic is rewired, and the undead become symbolic for what it means to exist in all its
physical and existential, its beauty and brutality."
-HTML Giant
"Bennett Sims' A Questionable Shape is a book I feel like I've been searching for for years but have
yet to find, until now. Sims' humble, cerebral, and addictively engaging narrator, comfortable
expostulating on videogames as well as Wittgenstein against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse,
marries highbrow to low, blends genre conventions with a ravenous intellectual curiosity and depth,
and delivers one of the bravest, funniest, and strangest narratives I've come across in recent memory.
At times you'll find yourself comparing it to Thomas Bernhard, David Foster Wallace, or Nicholson Baker,
and then find the comparison lacking, not because this book is in any way inferior to these writers,
but because it is as good or better, and moreover, unlike them in that it is its own bizarre animal,
idiosyncratic and utterly new."
-Benjamin Hale
"In A Questionable Shape everything is questioned – love, family, memory, the way we lead our
lives. Even loss itself seems obsolete in these worn out Zombified days. And yet, out beyond
the margins of genre, two young men embark on a search as worthy as Walker Percy’s in The Moviegoer,
taking us into a fascinating textual netherworld of footnotes full of Heidegger and haiku, leading us
on a journey as ancient and true as a son’s desperate search for a father whose undead life may not
be worse than the broken existence he left behind. Bennett Sims brings an allusive genius energy
to everything from YouTube to Euripides in this inquiry into what survives the onslaught, in a
world–our world, we come to recognize—suffering a major case of apocalypse fatigue."
-Charles D'Ambrosio
"A Questionable Shape is part George A. Romero, part Thomas Bernhard - as much an epistemology
of the zombie as it is a thriller. So fascinating are its explorations - and, within the
constraints of its topic, so wide-ranging - that reading it I often had the unusual experience of
pausing to wander down some byway of thought and finding myself unable to say whether I had ventured
there independently or was remembering a footnote from earlier in the book. It's playful, absorbing,
bittersweet, and intelligent, and, like a bite, it gets under your skin."
-Kevin Brockmeier
"How would the textures of ordinary life be altered by the return of the recently dead? What would
zombie consciousness itself be like? Would it gravitate toward the most powerful memories and
impressions of life? Or is a zombie a creature on whom habit operates more powerfully than
novelty? In A Questionable Shape, the spectacular horror of zombies has been removed to
the background. Instead, this novel is about walking, driving, reading, waking up, going on dates,
taking care of friends and parents and children, grocery shopping. It also includes some of the
most exquisite descriptions of light that I have ever read. Striking, beautiful, funny, and not
like anything else."
-Aaron Kunin
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Mira Corpora
by Jeff Jackson
$16, ISBN 978-1-937512-13-2, 182 pages
* 'MY YEAR ZERO,' AN EXCERPT IN
GUERNICA MAGAZINE
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming September 2013)
"It’s fine work in its manic pacing and its summoning of certain cultural emblems. Present tense with
a vengeance. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this
kind of fiction to hit them in the face."
-Don DeLillo
Mira Corpora is the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson, an inspired,
dreamlike adventure by a distinctive new talent.
Literary and inventive, but also fast-paced and gripping, Mira Corpora charts the journey
of a young runaway. A coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, featuring a
colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette
tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar.
With astounding precision, Jackson weaves a moving tale of discovery and self-preservation
across a startling, vibrant landscape.
JEFF JACKSON holds an MFA from NYU and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony
and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award-winning
Collapsable Giraffe company.
Additional Reviews
"Jeff Jackson is one of the most extraordinarily gifted young writers I’ve read in a very long time.
His strangely serene yet gripping, unsettling, and beautifully rendered novel Mira Corpora
has within it all the earmarks of an important new literary voice."
-Dennis Cooper
"Jeff Jackson is a fresh and startling voice in contemporary fiction—a hallucinatory realist whose prose
has the scary energy of rock and roll, and who writes with the assurance of a born storyteller."
-David Gates
"There is a scene in this arresting novel in which a group of feral teenagers experience 'a hushed air
of reverence when we confront the lurid and savage details' of a painting executed by one of their
own tribe. The reader would be well-advised to approach Mira Corpora in the same attitude.
The prose, in the spirit of Dennis Cooper and Brian Evenson, reads like dispatches from the blackness of a Bill Henson photograph. Jeff Jackson has had his vision, and it is worth a good hard look."
-Justin Taylor
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Nothing
by Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon
$16, ISBN 978-1-937512-11-8, 192 pages
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming November 2013)
Epic wildfires are snaking through the Sapphires and the Bitterroots, closing
in on the valley. The entire west is seemingly ablaze when James hitchhikes to Missoula, in search of
clues to his father’s mysterious death two decades earlier.
Ruth traded a dead-end life in Minneapolis for a dead-end life in Missoula. But in Missoula,
she’s got Bridget. “[Bridget] was gorgeous... but that wasn’t it, that didn’t quite explain it.
What explained it was the curse. The curse of the unreasonably pretty, the curse of cult leaders
and dictators. It sucked everyone to her, it consumed her, made her untouchable.”
After a local girl dies at a party, signaling the end of fun for the twentysomethings of Missoula,
James and Ruth become involved. But jealousy over Bridget quickly complicates things.
Nothing announces an assertive new voice, while also capturing the angst and
foreboding that could mark it as an even grander generational statement.
ANNE MARIE WIRTH CAUCHON
received her MFA from the University of Montana. She studies English, Cultural Studies and Comparative
Literature at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In 2010 she received a MacDowell fellowship
for the manuscript of Nothing. It is her first novel.
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FREQUENCIES: Volume 3
Essays by Antonia Crane, D. Foy, Lawrence Shainberg, and more!
$10, ISBN 978-1-937512-15-6, 142 pages
* PRE-ORDER FOR $10
* SUBSCRIBE FOR $15
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming October 2013)
[Norman Mailer] likes to say that all novelists are actors at heart. Over the years, it’s been
a useful metaphor… a reference to the voices and identities he explores at his desk, but tonight
he’s pushing it into reality. He’s an actor unqualified and the role he plays is Hemingway,
the writer whose voice he sought to emulate when he discovered it more than sixty years ago,
the writer whose suicide some forty years ago, made him realize, as if for the first time, the
immeasurable risk of the profession he had chosen.
-Lawrence Shainberg, from his essay ‘Writing on the Road’ in Frequencies: Vol.3
At once a code, an essence, an ideal, an ethic, a force, a thing, and a state, krumpness for the
krumper is in all seriousness akin to godliness, bestowed upon the krumper, or so real krumpers say,
by no less than God Himself… The youths in this scene, every last one, are so far down in the folds
of krumpness, the world of their daily existence has been subsumed to them themselves—for this brief
time, they are the world.
-D. Foy, from his essay 'This is Not a Trend: Krump and the Ko-opting of Krumpness' in
Frequencies: Vol.3
The latest installment of Frequencies follows Mailer and George Plimpton to Vienna, for a
staged reading of ‘Zelda,’ based on correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds; D. Foy
tracks krump, from street-art to reality television; Antonia Crane on being down-and-out in San Francisco,
and a discussion between photographer Lynn Davis and husband, Rudolph Wurlitzer.
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Made to Break
by D. Foy
$16, ISBN 978-1-937512-16-3, 202 pages
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming February 2014)
"Reading D. Foy's prose is like watching Robert Stone and Wallace Stevens drag race across a frozen
lake at midnight."
-Anthony Swofford
Made to Break is the story of a pack of friends celebrating the holidays at a remote cabin near
Lake Tahoe, California. After being stranded by a near-fatal accident and severe weather, the friends are
forced to confront the squalor, greed, and sadness from which they've spent most of their lives attempting
to escape.
Made to Break is a melancholic, savage look at relationships and the lies we tell ourselves,
suffused with spirited language and humor.
D. FOY has had work published or forthcoming
in Bomb, Frequencies: Volume 3, Post Road, The Literary Review, and
The Georgia Review. His story, "Barnacles of the Fuzz," appeared in Forty New Stories: New
Writing from Harper Perennial, edited by Cal Morgan. An essay on the American laundromat will appear
in Snorri Bros.'s Laundromat, an homage in photographs to laundromats throughout New York City,
available from powerHouse Books.
