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.

"I was maybe 24, 25?" says Obenauf, he and Wood laughing over speakerphone from their home in Granville, Ohio. "I still carried all my stuff in a backpack. So I showed up, and he introduced me to Philip Glass. We went downstairs, and the whole time while the two of us were talking, Philip Glass was in the room above us, playing the piano." Obenauf's pitch to Wurlitzer was more entertaining than convincing, but the conversation continued, and shortly after Two Dollar Radio switched their distribution from Biblio to the sizeable indie Consortium, they acquired The Drop Edge of Yonder, Wurlitzer's first novel in 24 years, which TDR published in April of last year.

In the house's 2009 catalog, a photo of Obenauf and Wood's daughter, Rio, lamping in sunglasses, adorns the first page. Beyond is a trove of extremely weird fiction: Gary Indiana's entertainingly caustic Fu Manchu pastiche The Shanghai Gesture, out this month; Joshua Mohr's Some Things That Meant the World to Me, an unreliably narrated torrent of child abuse and dumpster diving, due in June; Xiaoda Xao's The Cave Man, from a former denizen of Mao's jails; and a run of Wurlitzer reissues, including Nog and a "69ed" edition of Quake (1974) and Flats (1971). Crust, Lawrence Shainberg's gross-out nose-picking fantasia, and Erotomania, Francis Levy's pornographic romance, along with Drop Edge and the six other books the press has published since 2006, shore up the backlist.

In part, both Obenauf and Wood credit Johnny Temple, the musician, writer, and proprietor of Brooklyn's Akashic Books, for their swift ascension. "I read this article in an old issue of Punk Planet that Johnny Temple had written, saying that everybody should start their own book publishing company," says Obenauf. "So I sent him an e-mail." Temple helped arrange Obenauf's eventual introduction to Wurlitzer. Akashic—along with the Grove Press of the '50s and '60s, and John Martin's fabled Black Sparrow Press—also provided Two Dollar Radio with a model to follow: aesthetically consistent, editorially adventurous, and manageably tiny.

Obenauf and Wood, who sport matching wrist tattoos of the Two Dollar Radio logo, run the press from home, fitting in long hours around the day jobs they still work in order to help sustain TDR's hopelessly non-commercial list. "From what I've read about the way publishing functioned in the past, they'd see the rationale for publishing a joke book in order to subsidize publishing William Faulkner," says Obenauf. "I think that's something that's been lost in modern publishing. Now it's more like a book about pre-teen vampires to subsidize another book about pre-teen vampires."

In an age when Barnes & Noble's shelves seem to be stocked by a handful of companies and every dinner-party conversation revolves around the same five books, finding a fresh read can be daunting. Rather than plodding through a string of letdowns, seek out niche publishers that curate their lists with care and taste. Here are three of the best bets.

TWO DOLLAR RADIO
Started in 2005 by Eric Obenauf, a bartender, and his wife and brother, 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
Recent Picks: Lawrence Shainberg's Crust, Francis Levy's Erotomania.

Far from the cubicles of corporate Manhattan publishing, Eric Obenauf, 26, and Eliza Jane Wood, 28, run a publishing outfit called Two Dollar Radio out of their home in Granville, Ohio. The husband and wife sport tattoos of the company logo on their wrists. They put photos of their two-year-old daughter, Rio, and their dogs, Hoon and Scarlet, in their book catalogues. They both work second jobs: he waits tables and manages a restaurant; she proofreads textbooks. They used to live in New York, but the cost of living and running a business was too high, so they moved to Ohio, near family. “We have grass and stuff,” says Obenauf. They also have a fledgling publishing company that’s on the verge of busting out from tiny to an official small press.

Two Dollar Radio has meager roots: its first book was Obenauf’s own novel, Can You Hear Me Screaming?, which sold 300 copies as an e-book. Three years later it is publishing The Drop Edge of Yonder, the first novel in more than 20 years by counterculture reporter Rudolph Wurlitzer, who was previously published by Knopf; Two Dollar Radio launched it last month with a 5,000-copy printing.

Obenauf and Wood met in 2000 as NYU undergrads. He was studying dramatic writing, she art education. After graduation, they married and moved to San Diego, where Obenauf came upon Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books. They each read it and, in 2005, with no publishing experience, decided to start a publishing company. They named it after a comment from a “loud and obnoxious drunk” at the bar where Obenauf was then working, who told Obenauf, “Don’t mind me, I make more noise than a $2 radio.”

Today, Obenauf describes the books he and Wood publish as “bold, for publishing, and [making] more noise than a $2 radio.” The house has published five books, all paperback, and all novels except for one. They’ve had moderate success: Vagabond Blues, a novel by Emmanuel Burgin, was a San Diego Book Award finalist, and another novel, The Drummer by Anthony Neil Smith, was reviewed in the Chicago Tribune. In addition to Drop Edge, the spring/summer ’08 list includes 1940, the 15th book by Jay Neugeboren; and Erotomania: A Romance by Francis Levy, which PW reviewed favorably. In October, Two Dollar Radio will publish Crust, a novel by 71-year-old Lawrence Shainberg, who has received praise from Norman Mailer and who, like Wurlitzer, hasn’t published a novel in more than 20 years. Two Dollar currently publishes three books a season, and print runs range from 2,000 to 7,500 copies. Obenauf and Wood hope to increase output to six to 10 books a season next year.

Some submissions have come through Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple, who Obenauf contacted after reading Temple’s article in a “revenge of print”-themed issue of Punk Planet. Now that word is building, says Wood, submissions are coming from other sources, too.

Two Dollar adheres to a DIY aesthetic: its catalogues are 5”x4” photocopied pages stapled together. Obenauf works with writers on big-picture editing; Wood copyedits. Obenauf handles jacket design, and they both work on the books’ interior layout. The house doesn’t advertise, although it just started mailing excerpts from forthcoming novels to booksellers. It produces about 100 galleys for each book for the review media and runs a Website at www.twodollarradio.com. Obenauf’s brother, Brian Obenauf, handles publicity from his Brooklyn home, and Consortium distributes the books. Obenauf and Wood attend book festivals throughout the year.

“We have to support ourselves with other jobs,” says Wood. “But our passion is Two Dollar Radio. We’re slaves to it.”

Gathered in an overlooked corner of Book Expo, the gargantuan publishers’ convention in New York, are the founders of a handful of small “non-conglomeratized” presses. There is much talk of the poverty vows and mule-like work ethic required to bring “embargoed” and “shut out” literature to the famished readers who have been shunted aside by the giant play-it-safe firms. The perennial favourite of the indie publishing scene is Johnny Temple, a handsome, serious “post-punk” rocker who founded Akashic Books after his band Girls Against Boys was “outrageously overpaid” to sign with Geffen Records. Temple’s slogan is “reverse gentrification of the literary world”, and his taste runs from crime stories to the latest offerings by Amiri Baraka and Tom Hayden. Akashic’s biggest hit to date is a novel called Hairstyles of the Damned, about the perils of growing up with punkish predilections on Chicago’s South Side.

Valerie Merians of Melville House, a literary press with a sensible list of first novels and reprinted classics, likens Random House to the Queen Mary. “It takes them for ever to switch course. We’re like a skiff: to change direction all we need to do is turn our sail.” Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press points out that the Queen Mary fares better than a sailboat in a storm. “On the twenty-second of each month we run out of money and have to wait ten days for a cheque from our distributor, praying that it will be enough to see us through.” The standard advance from the indies is $1,000, and Nash proudly announces that he has never shelled out a penny more. “Nowhere else in American capitalism do people earn career credits for the amount of money they are willing to gamble on individual intellectual property. It’s toxic.”

I strike up a conversation with Eric Obenauf, the publisher of Two Dollar Radio, which has been putting out books since 2005. Eric is twenty-five, a tall, thin Midwesterner with an eagerness, as his mission statement declares, to carve his name “on the wet concrete of the world”. Bound with a strip of Indian fabric, his catalogue has a handmade, collectible feel. “To re-affirm the literary, cultural and artistic ambitions of the publishing industry”, says the first page. “We’re about belief, not confidence” adds Eric. “Confidence is for people with neat hair.”

We go to the restaurant in Brooklyn where Eric tended bar while starting Two Dollar Radio in his apartment. “I’m willing to shove my ignorance in people’s faces”, he says, quoting a favourite line from Ray Bradbury’s novel Farenheit 451. “I didn’t know what a bar code was when I started”, he says, referring to the inventory control number that must appear on every consumer product in order for it to make it into stores. The name of his press came to him when a man sat down at the bar and said, “Don’t mind me. I make more noise than a two dollar radio”. His list of authors is impressive; I recognize a couple of names, writers who became fed up with their former publishers or who were discarded by them for presenting the usual “insurmountable marketing challenge”. His lead title, which will appear in 2008, is a novel by Rudy Wurlitzer called The Drop Edge of Yonder. Rudy is a friend of mine as it happens; I remember him telling me that he was working on this book. Eric presents me with a galley copy which I read at home in a single mesmerized sitting. It is a Western as Celine might have written one, the characters stripped down to the zero degree of their existence. The protagonist is a mountain man who wanders west after the collapse of the fur trade in the 1850s. In the opening scene a Shoshone “half breed” called Not Here Not There condemns him to “drift like a blind man between the worlds”, in a purgatory of frontier emptiness and mayhem.

After reading the novel, I pay a visit to Rudy in Hudson, about 100 miles upriver from Manhattan. Although we arranged the visit in advance, Rudy greets me with an air of mild surprise, as if looking at himself in an amused and curious way through my eyes. We met twenty years ago, when we worked together on a script about a lovesick burglar. Rudy was already well known for his road movies and his minimalist novels of the late 1960s. I remind him of a disagreement we had over our respective writing credit. “I took a shine to you”, he told me then. “Now I’m going to nail your hands to the barn.” We both laugh. The disagreement died away because the movie never got made. “Par for the course on the celluloid trail”, he says. Rudy taught me the keys to screenwriting: the subplot that every scene should have, the tiny echoes, the beats that add up, the abrupt stops and repressed possibilities.

In the early 1970s, he wrote a Western for the director Sam Peckinpah entitled Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. One of the characters is called Alias. “It’s why people went West”, says Rudy, “to get free of their names. As soon as they knew where they were heading, the frontier was finished.” When asked who he is, Alias answers, “That’s a good question”. Rudy suggested that Bob Dylan play the role. On being introduced to him, Peckinpah said, “I prefer Roger Miller”. Dylan was entranced by Peckinpah. “We both were.” He was from Fresno, an ex-marine. He carried a revolver and seemed to be perpetually at war. His father had been a judge known for his harsh sentences. “He was the kind of American character that I was drawn to in those days. All he did was insult Dylan, who followed him around like a puppy.”

Now Rudy says that he’s finished with movies. “Drop Edge of Yonder tore it for me. It rid me of my obsession with California. I had started out writing fiction, and after fifty-odd screenplays it was as if I had to show myself how to do it again, so I could turn all that work into something solid.” We sit in the backyard, where an elegant one-armed workman in a black leather vest tends to the garden. “Sometimes I see him out here in the middle of the night,” says Rudy, “lying on the grass, smoking a joint. It’s his refuge.” Two Dollar Radio, he feels, is the perfect publisher for his novel. “Eric’s still learning how to put his socks on, but he understands the book in a way that few editors would. Do you know that his father ran a diner until a grease fire burned it to the ground?” I marvel at Eric’s idealism. Rudy nods. “It usually leads to trouble, but for a young publisher it’s a valuable asset.”