I'm Trying to Reach You

Just sent files off to the printer for Barbara Browning's second novel, I'm Trying to Reach You (June '12). We're insanely excited. This book is like Rear Window with computer screens.

Here's what it's all about:

"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

"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

It’s the summer of 2009, and the great dance icons of our time appear to be dropping like flies. First MJ, then Pina, then Merce… wtf?! Gray Adams, unlikely sleuth, must decipher a series of cryptic choreographies, YouTube comments, and weird anagrammatic monikers to find the answer… before it’s too late.

Barbara Browning has written a telling, comical novel about performance art, the electric guitar, American identity, racial and sexual ambiguity, and the challenge of accepting the mortality of the people we love.





Drop me a line at eric[at]twodollarradio.com if you'd like to consider for review.

Baby Geisha Galleys!

We now have galleys in hand of Trinie Dalton's forthcoming story collection, Baby Geisha, and they look mighty fine!

Any media/bookseller folk interested in perusing a galley, write to eric[at]twodollarradio.com.

Galleys of Joshua Mohr's Damascus

We're about to have back in hand the galleys of Joshua Mohr's forthcoming third novel, Damascus (out October 2011).

"Mohr is the bard of the underbelly, and the Mission District is his playground. Part Harry Crews, part Charles Bukowski, and part Franz Kafka, Mohr will make you squirm, laugh, recognize, and take pause. Behind his wayward and dissolute characters, burns the clear-eyed moral vision of a very unique artist."
-Jonathan Evison

"We're in the belly of the whale, man. We've been swallowed whole."

"It's 2003 and the country is divided evenly for and against the Iraq War. Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco's Mission District, becomes the unlikely setting for a showdown between the opposing sides.

Tensions come to a boil when Owen, the bar's proprietor who has recently taken to wearing a Santa suit full-time, agrees to host an art show by an ambitious artist longing to take her act to the high-wire by nailing live fish to the walls as a political statement.

An incredibly creative and fully-rendered cast of characters orbit the bar. There's No Eyebrows, a cancer patient who has come to the Mission to die anonymously; Shambles, the patron saint of the hand job; Revv, a lead-singer who acts too much like a lead-singer.

By gracefully tackling such complicated topics as cancer, Iraq, and issues of self-esteem, Joshua Mohr has painted his most accomplished novel yet.

Parties interested in receiving a copy for review or perusal, write to Brian Obenauf at brian[at]twodollarradio.com.

You Are My Heart galleys

We're in the process of getting galleys of You Are My Heart and Other Stories, Jay Neugeboren's fourth (and our first!) story collection printed. The stories travel from the secluded villages in the south of France, to the cattle crawl in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa, to the hard-knock adolescent streets of Brooklyn, while Neugeboren examines the great mysteries and complexities that unsettle and comprise human relationships.

Stories from the collection have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Notre Dame Review, Columbia Magazine, Hadassah, and one story -- 'Comfort' -- is forthcoming in everyone's favorite lit mag Black Clock, due out this spring (I believe).

There's a quote from Wayne Koestenbaum from a Bookforum review he wrote of Bolano's Last Evenings on Earth, in which he says that he is addicted to the haze that floats above Bolano's fiction. When I read that blurb something clicked, because that's how I feel about Jay's stories. Although I've come to understand that this "haze" is not murky, but the magic associated with wandering into the complete and fully rendered world of the author.

Anyone interested in getting an advance reader copy of You Are My Heart can drop a line to Brian at brian[at]twodollarradio.com.

The Correspondence Artist Galleys

So, due back any day now from the printer, are galleys of Barbara Browning's debut novel, The Correspondence Artist (late-ish February 2011), a witty new comedy sure to delight fans of Nicholson Baker, Miranda July, and Charlie Kaufman.

The book was excerpted in Bomb Magazine this past summer, and will be excerpted in Knock this November.

Harry Mathews says, "The Correspondence Artist is smart, funny, sexy, knowledgeable, subtle, disturbing, light-hearted, obsessive, and tragic: a comedy that, I surmise, is wholly confessional and wholly imaginary."

Here's the story: Vivian, a writer, is carrying on a relationship with an internationally acclaimed artist. There are those who stand to profit — and suffer — from the revelation of her paramour’s identity, so in the service of telling her tale, she creates a series of fictional lovers. There is Tzipi, a sixty-eight-year-old Nobel-winning female Israeli writer; Binh, a twenty-something Vietnamese video artist; Santuxto, a poetic Basque separatist; and Djeli, a dreadlocked Malian world-music star.

Largely through Vivian’s e-mail correspondence, she divulges the story of their relationship, from their first meeting to their jumpy spam filter, which arrests the more explicit notes that result in Vivian being held captive in a tiger cage in a Berlin hotel/being chased by a Medusa-like woman on a Greek Island/imprisoned by a splinter cell of Basque separatists/in an African hospital with a bout of Dengue Fever.

Barbara Browning’s captivating wit and passionate intelligence make The Correspondence Artist a love story like none other.

Those interested in receiving Advanced Reader Copies of the book should write to Brian at brian[at]twodollarradio.com.

Here's an excerpt:

Open publication - Free publishing

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.