Big Ups to Books on WOSU

I got to participate on WOSU, central Ohio's NPR affiliate, monthly roundtable discussion of books yesterday, with the always-stellar Kassie Rose and Kevin Griffith, and host Christopher Purdy. It was a bucket of fun, as I regularly tune in to the show, to have the opportunity to share some of my own book recommendations with listeners, as well as to chat up Two Dollar Radio some.

Here's a link to the video of the discussion.

And here are some of the books that I discussed and/or mentioned:
These Dreams of You -- Steve Erickson
SPRAWL -- Danielle Dutton
Everything Sings -- Denis Wood
Saguaro -- Carson Mell
Scurvy Goonda -- Chris McCoy

These Dreams of You

"This was the great test, whether there was a song the country could sing in common. Instead, more than ever it's a country of many songs all of them noisy, without a single melody that anyone cares about carrying. The country is a babel of not just melodies that no one shares but memory; and as Babel fractured language into thousands, the country is the sum total of a memory fractured into millions, not one of them a memory of the country as it actually has ever existed."

Steve Erickson is a hero of American fiction, and I just read his new novel, These Dreams of You, which is incredibly graceful, dreamy, ambitious, and so perfectly of this moment. Definitely recommended.

Orange Eats Creeps Galleys

We just printed galleys of Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps. If you are affiliated with the media and would be keen on checking out a copy, please contact Brian Obenauf by email at brian[at]twodollarradio.com.

Steve Erickson says in his introduction that "The exhilaration of such a novel is nearly beyond calculation. If a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here."

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.

Steve Erickson's Introduction to Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps