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Radio Iris
by Anne-Marie Kinney
$16, ISBN 978-0-9832471-7-3, 192 pages
* READ AN EXCERPT
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming May 2012)
"Working for a company that might be called Kafka Ballard & Dickinson, bearing a kind of sonic
witness to a world of static, Iris likes to listen the way some like to watch. Searching for home,
she’s the passenger of her own voice. Anne-Marie Kinney’s Radio Iris is a novel of unsettling
humor and elusive terror, a piercing loneliness and the strangeness of the banal, and a hushed power
that grows in volume before your ears."
-Steve Erickson
Radio Iris is the story of Iris Finch, a socially awkward daydreamer with a job as the receptionist/personal
assistant to an eccentric and increasingly absent businessman. When Iris is not sitting behind her desk waiting for
the phone to ring, she makes occasional stabs at connection with the earth and the people around her through careful
observation and insomniac daydreams, always more watcher than participant as she shuttles between her one-bedroom
apartment and the office she inhabits so completely, yet has never quite understood.
Her world cracks open with the discovery of “the man next door.” Over the next few weeks or months
(the passage of time is iffy for Iris), she takes it upon herself to learn everything she can about this
stranger. But the closer she gets to him, the more troubling questions at the heart of her own life rise to the
surface, questions like - Why does she keep having the same dream? Why is it that she and her brother don’t
seem to have a single shared memory of their childhood? What is it her boss actually does? In the end, Iris
is faced with a choice she never imagined, and a reality she never knew enough to dread.
Anne-Marie Kinney's work has appeared in Black Clock,
Indiana Review, and Keyhole, and has been performed by Los Angeles’s Word Theatre. Radio Iris is her first novel.
Additional Reviews
"Radio Iris is a revelation, a whimsical, charming and beautifully observed novel about quotidian life. Anne-Marie Kinney's
Iris is a contemporary version of Calvino's Marcovaldo, caught between the rich expression of her own humanity and the random demands
of the workaday world."
-T.C. Boyle
"Radio Iris brings new shimmer and depth to the word 'sensory' - Iris's perceptions are both
keen and open, so mysterious and grounded, and the book builds a narrative of mystery and longing
with visceral, ringing precision."
-Aimee Bender
"In Radio Iris, Anne-Marie Kinney, introduces us to Iris Finch, a young woman of a new lost and lonely generation.
With prose as pitch perfect as the Buddy Holly songs Iris loves, Kinney draws us into a world both familiar and quotidian and unfathomable
and harrowing."
-Bruce Bauman
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I'm Trying to Reach You
by Barbara Browning
$16, ISBN 978-0-9832471-1-1, 192 pages
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming June 2012)
"Exquisite storytelling at its finest. I’m Trying to Reach You cultivates our relationship addiction
with YouTube and our desire for interconnectivity while illuminating what it means to
strive, cope and love with all of our heart, brain, body and soul. It is all here.
Browning writes with humor, wit, grace and passion to the human purpose, mortality and the joys of
existence. Start reading.”
-Karen Finley
“I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died. When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was,
That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’”
First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham.
Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred
by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: Someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny
resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.)
I’m Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how
we love and communicate with one another.
Barbara Browning has a PhD in comparative literature
from Yale. She teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She's also a poet
and a dancer. She lives with her son in Greenwich Village. The Correspondence Artist is her first novel.
Additional Reviews
"The writing of Barbara Browning reminds me of the young, spirited Françoise Sagan whose first three novels
Bonjour tristesse (1954), Un certain sourire (1955) and Aimez-vous Brahms? (1959), were written
when she was still in her teens and early twenties and are beyond brilliantine. The film version of Bonjour Tristesse
1957 was directed by Otto Preminger starring a lovely Jean Seberg. If only Mr. Preminger were alive today to direct a
filmed adaptation of Ms. Browning's I'm Trying to Reach You. That would be granada."
-Vaginal Crème Davis
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How To Get Into the Twin Palms
by Karolina Waclawiak
$16, ISBN 978-0-9832471-8-0, 192 pages
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming July 2012)
"Waclawiak takes the immigrant novel and spins it on its head. A great addition to 1.5 generation
literature, beautifully written, funny and touching."
-Gary Shteyngart
How To Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in
Los Angeles, who struggles between retaining her parents' Polish culture and trying to assimilate into her adopted
community. She lusts after Lev, a Russian man who frequents the Twin Palms nightclub down the block from Anya's apartment.
It is Anya's wish to gain entrance to this seeminly exclusive club. How To Get Into the Twin Palms is a really funny
and often moving book that provides a unique twist on the immigrant story, and provides a credible portrait of the city of Los Angeles,
literally burning to the ground.
"It was a strange choice to decide to pass as a Russian. But it was a question of proximity and level of allure.
Russians were everywhere in Los Angeles, especially in my neighborhood and held a certain sense of mystery. I had long
attempted to inhabit my Polish skin and was happy to finally crawl out of it. I would never tell my mother. She only
thought of them as crooks and beneath us. They felt the same about us, we were beneath them. It had always been a
question of who was under whom."
Karolina Waclawiak
received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She is the Deputy Editor of The Believer
and lives and writes in Brooklyn.
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The Other Side of the World
by Jay Neugeboren
$17, ISBN 978-0-9826848-8-7, 300 pages
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming November 2012)
The Other Side of the World tells the story of Charlie, a young journeyman whose friend Nick
convinces him to move to Singapore for work, where he falls in love with the dramatic contrasts
of nearby Borneo, from the apocalyptic ravaging of its land to its serene natural beauty.
When Nick dies suddenly and mysteriously, Charlie returns to the U.S. and his father, Max, a writer
and professor whose most successful former student, Seana, has taken up residence in Charlie's
childhood home.
The Other Side of the World is a seductive novel of unlikely groupings and intrigue
that intelligently mines such grand topics as fate and love.
Jay Neugeboren is the author of sixteen books, including
two prize-winning novels (The Stolen Jew, Before My Life Began), two award-winning books of non-fiction
(Imagining Robert, Transforming Madness), and four collections of award-winning stories. He has won six
consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. He lives in New York City.
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Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place
by Scott McClanahan
$16, ISBN 978-1-937512-03-3, 192 pages
* PRE-ORDER FOR $16
To request a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.
(Coming March 2013)
"McClanahan’s prose is unfettered and kinetic and his stories seem like a hyper-modern iteration of local color fiction.
His delivery is guileless and his morality ambivalent and you get the sense, while reading him, that he is sitting next
to you on a barstool, eating peanuts and drinking a beer, and intermittently getting up to pick a song on the jukebox.”
-The Rumpus, on Stories V!
When Scott McClanahan was 14 he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
Crapalachia is a portrait of these formidable years, coming of age in rural West Virginia.
Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history,
providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.
There were 13 of them. The children had names that ended in Y sounds. There was Betty and there was Annie and there
was Stirley and there was Stanley and there was Leslie and there was Gary and there was Larry and there was Terry.
Ruby said: “I like names that end in Y.”
They all grew up in Danese, WV, eating blackberries for breakfast and eating blackberries for lunch and watching the snow
come beneath the door in the wintertime.
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN is the author of Stories II
and Stories V!. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, Vice, and New York Tyrant. His novel Hill William
is forthcoming from Tyrant Books.
