Forthcoming: The Orange Eats Creeps (9/2010)

“A ‘vampire’ novel as Céline might have written, with dashes of Blake and Burroughs: hallucinatory, poetic, passionate, excessive, sexually charged, hardcore in all the best senses of the word. Twilight this is not.”
—Steve Erickson

It’s the ’90s Pacific Northwest refracted through a dark mirror, where meth and madness hash it out in the woods. . . A band of hobo vampire junkies roam the blighted landscape—trashing supermarket breakrooms, praying to the altar of Poison Idea and GG Allin at basement rock shows, crashing senior center pancake breakfasts—locked in the thrall of Robitussin trips and their own wild dreams.

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.

With a scathing voice and penetrating delivery, Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps is one of the most ferocious debut novels in memory.

Grace Krilanovich has been a MacDowell colony fellow, and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize. Her first book, The Orange Eats Creeps, is the only novel to be excerpted twice in Black Clock.

==========

If you are affiliated with a media review outlet and would like to receive an advance reader's copy of The Orange Eats Creeps, please contract Brian Obenauf at brian [at] twodollarradio.com.

Forthcoming: The Visiting Suit: Stories From My Prison Life (11/2010)

“A masterful storyteller.” —Bookforum

“Xiaoda Xiao has made a stark and unforgettable contribution to the literature of imprisonment and survival.” —Scott Spencer

“When it comes to prison literature, China remains a great enigma. Whereas the Soviet Union gave us Alexander Solzhenitsyn, China has, of yet, produced no such comparable international voice in the modern age. Xiaoda Xiao’s The Cave Man is . . . a small start . . . a compelling look at Mao’s forced labor prisons.”
—Los Angeles Times

When Xiaoda Xiao was twenty years old, he tore a poster of Chairman Mao while inebriated. Several months later, Xiao was arrested in order to fulfill an absurd quota, and, without trial, declared a counterrevolutionary. He was sent to a labor prison on an island in Taihu Lake, where he worked in a stone quarry.

The Visiting Suit chronicles Xiao’s arrest through his release from the labor prison five years later.

The book, told in stories—which have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, DoubleTake, Confrontation, and Antaeus—focus equally on Xiao’s fellow inmates (a local theatre director, a veterinarian, a university professor), and capture their mutual everyday struggle to survive their sentences with dignity intact.

The cruelties inflicted upon the Chinese population by the government are ongoing, and The Visiting Suit provides a unique and important glimpse behind the curtain.

Xiaoda Xiao is the author of The Cave Man, a novel.

==========

If you are affiliated with a media review outlet and would like to receive an advance reader's copy of The Visiting Suit, please contract Brian Obenauf at brian [at] twodollarradio.com.