Erotomania Conversation

Erotomania: A Romance continues to win over reviewers and thwart nay-sayers.

Billy Thompson contributes some thoughtful, in-depth coverage to the December issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Thompson is clearly a Kundera fan (as is Francis Levy, I later learned), and so I take it as a positive sign that Thompson devotes so much space in comparing Erotomania (on some levels) with Identity.

"[Erotomania] can just as easily be a bookend to the beautifully nuanced prose of Milan Kundera as it can be a long-version story for a nudie mag minus the accompanying photographs. It's all in the context - as it is with most relationships."

(I've also included a full-cover shot of the book cover with this post, for the complete effect: some hot, full-body action.)

I Smile Back - Bookslut Review

There's a stellar review of I Smile Back by Erin McKnight in the December issue of Bookslut.

Finding a favorite passage was a difficult task, but here's the winner:

"Amy Koppelman explores with ruthless honesty a woman come undone. Laney remains captivating in her certainty that although her family's dissolution is her sole responsibility to deter, she can't quite conjure the necessary thwarting efforts. For the only thing as ferocious as Laney's lack of preventive action is her behavior, the reader powerless against her vice: an addict hooked to Koppelman's potent writing and her protagonist's unpredictable conduct."

Great Indiana Profile in Time Out New York

Michael Miller, in a great profile of Gary Indiana in Time Out New York in synch with the release of Indiana's new collection of essays, Utopia's Debris, says about the author:

"His nonfiction has an awe-inspiring syntax and rigorous sensibility that suggest Joan Didion’s political takedowns but have a droll power all their own, one that’s tuned in to the frequencies of art, sexual power and human folly."

Also, Arthur Nersesian has just contributed a great blurb for Indiana's first novel in six years, The Shanghai Gesture, which we'll be releasing in April '09:

"Indiana has gloriously revived an obscure Hollywood film of the same name, infused it with eroticism and intrigue - and added Dr. Fu Manchu! The result is a lustrous, laugh-out-loud world of bawd and mayhem; an erudite, charmingly operatic opium den of decadence that seesaws between high brow and low camp and reads as though Cormac McCarthy had rewritten Austin Powers."

I Smile Back - Elle + Bookforum

I Smile Back, Amy Koppelman's second novel, is due out on December 1, but the book is already garnering some really impressive reviews.

This week, from the December issue of Elle, and in the December/January issue of the always-thoughtful Bookforum.

From Elle:
"Stomach-churning... Koppelman mosly writes from inside Laney's disillusioned mind, ricocheting between the quotidian details of wife and motherhood and big-picture musings, forming exquisite stand-alone tone poems."

From Bookforum:
"Laney Brooks is a woman in agony, suffering from an undefined malady that makes standard housewife ennui—boredom from carpooling or picking up dry cleaning—look like a picnic. Laney’s despair, ably depicted by Amy Koppelman in her affecting second novel, I Smile Back, is rooted in childhood.

I Smile Back is now available in bookstores and through online retailers.

I Smile Back on Audible.com

I Smile Back, the stomach-churning new novel from Amy Koppelman (A Mouthful of Air), due out from Two Dollar Radio in December, is now available as an audio download through Audible.com as part of their "Indie First" program.

It's pretty amazing to digest the book in this way. Lauren Fortgang gives a great reading that adds an interesting dimention to Koppelman's protagonist, the dismantled Laney Brooks.

For those interested in a tangible copy, you can order the book now through online retailers, or pick one up at an independent bookstore near you.

Details Magazine: Boutique Publishers

TWO DOLLAR RADIO was picked by Timothy Hodler of Details as one of "three of the best bets" for "niche publishers that curate their lists with care and taste."

From the article:
"...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."

Also profiled in the piece were Small Beer Press and Dalkey Archive, both of whom are insanely rad.

PW: No to Kindle, Yes to Object Status

In the November 2 issue of Publishers Weekly, Claire Kirch continues the ongoing discussion regarding digitalizing book content.

Kirch spotlights Crust alongside boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague, released by Featherproof Books, as examples of indie presses disregarding the translation of a book to digital format.

From the article:
"Mainstream publishers are hastening to join the digital revolution, with many formatting their digital book content to make it conform to Kindle specifications. Some houses are even making digital book content accessible via Web-enabled cellphones.

"Bucking this trend toward digitalizing book content, two independent small presses—Featherproof Books, a Chicago press founded in 2005 by a pair of Time Out Chicago staffers, and Two Dollar Radio, a Granville, Ohio-based press founded by a husband-wife team, also in 2005—insist on pursuing a more tangible aesthetic in book production. Both presses publish primarily fiction and both are adamant that the physical book itself is not just a work of art, but a highly evolved object keyed to a reader's experience—a philosophy that runs counter to the central premise behind digital access."

Nasalism Blog.

Celebrate Liberation.
Celebrate Self-Reliance.
Celebrate Invention.
Celebrate Re-Creation.
Celebrate Blogs.
Celebrate Hope.
Celebrate Crust.
Celebrate You.
Celebrate Change.
Celebrate Blogs.

Gary Indiana's Utopia's Debris

We're publishing Gary Indiana's first novel since 2003's Do Everything in the Dark, The Shanghai Gesture. This book will be out in April of 2009.

However, right now, in our present moment, "one of America's leading cultural critics" has a new collection of essays fresh out from Basic Books, called Utopia's Debris.

It sounds pretty stellar, as the author riffs on topics ranging from Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial win to Bill Clinton's autobiography, from Celine to Wurlitzer.

Yes: believe it. There is an entire chapter on the works of Rudolph Wurlitzer.

From the preface of Utopia's Debris: "We live in the wreckage of a century I lived through the second half of, a century of false messiahs, twisted ideologies, shipwrecked hopes, pathetic answers."

From Kirkus: "Indiana's thorough and balanced research coagulates into a convincing argument that the ills of the world are not natural occurrences like glaciation; there is accountability, and these people are responsible. A polychrome pastiche that soars with delicious insights."

Is Going Grody the New Edgy?

Carolyn Kellogg, the lead blogger at the Los Angeles Times' book blog, Jacket Copy, considers whether "familiar literary tropes - sex, murder, betrayal, booze, isolation, love, war, warlocks, aliens - have become too worn at the edges?" And whether "ick is the last literary frontier" to explore.

To discuss her point, Kellogg mentions the worldwide bestseller Wetlands by German author Charlotte Roche, coming stateside spring '09, and Crust, by Lawrence Shainberg.

She says, regarding Crust: "Shainberg writes of a man who changes culture by picking his nose. No matter how well the book lampoons New Age movements, I'm still grossed out by the title and the premise. Nosepicking as a central metaphor sounds ridiculous and amusing - but it also makes me go 'ewww.'"

Blog Wars: East Coast vs West Coast

Unwittingly, we stirred up some old East Coast / West Coast dust that hasn't completely settled since the days of Tupac and Notorious BIG.

In a post on his blog, Chekhov's Mistress, Bud Parr mentions his move to Tivoli, New York, and suggests that the captains of the Two Dollar Radio team uproot and move up the Hudson River as well. He did make a particularly solid and smooth delivery at the release party for Crust (attention: Tivoli Town Council).

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, in the beatific forrested mountains of south Oregon, Tod Davies, editor and publisher of the about-to-assault-the-indie-publishing-scene Extreminating Angel Press, discusses regionalism and makes a convincing (and blunt) case for a Two Dollar Radio move to the Pacific Northwest:

"...and I’ve been thinking about my publishing mentors, Two Dollar Radio, Eric and Eliza Obenauf, who keep thinking about moving their act to New York because that’s where the independent press action is. And I’m saying now, Eric and Eliza, don’t do it! Get out here to Portland! We need you out here…and PDX is a shorthop skip and a jump to Manhattan any day. Come on out, and I’ll drive up, and we’ll go to Village Books together! And then we’ll drive back and have another drink with the guys from Powell’s…"

Adding to the West Coast discussion, was Bruce Rutledge, of our pals Chin Music Press (who we're also sharing a booth with at the 2009 BEA), who offered "free babysitting services for Rio whenever the $2 folks are in Seattle."

If you have a suggested destination for us (and you aren't related by blood to us), then we'd like to hear them (if you are related by blood [mom], then we wouldn't like to hear).

Celebrate Good Books.

We celebrated the release of Lawrence Shainberg's first novel in not one but two decades, Crust, in a wonderfully intimate loft in the Village.

Entertainment for the party was provided by Andrew Blauner, in the form of his never-ending supply of two dollar bills.

Pictured here are Eric O., the author, and Eliza.

Thanks to all those who came out and ate the food and drank the drinks and celebrated this wonderful book that - Larry told me - has been eight years in the making.

Crust - Los Angeles Times Book Review

Tod Goldberg (Living Dead Girl, Fake Liar Cheat, Simplify) reviews Crust very favorably in this Sunday's Los Angeles Times Book Review.

However, the review is presently available online.

Here is an upstanding excerpt:

"A postmodern examination of the self that teases the very idea of postmodernism. . . that rare bit of lampoonery that is both humorous and smart."

You should be reading this book.

The Cave Man / Xiaoda Xiao

We're extremely excited to announce that we'll be publishing the debut novel by Xiaoda Xiao, called The Cave Man, an exceptionally moving and fascinating portrait of a brutalized man named Ja Feng, imprisoned during Chairman Mao's rule.

The story begins as Ja Feng is contained within a 3' x 4.5' solitary confinement cell in a prison camp. He has survived this punishment for a miraculous nine months, a period of time that has forced him to question his basic human faculties and emotions.

The Cave Man follows Ja Feng as he is released from his solitary confinement, as he is forced to integrate with fellow prisoners who view his skeletal figure and erratic screaming fits as freakish, and his heartbreaking attempts to assimilate into Chinese culture, to reestablish familial bonds and to seek out an ordinary human experience.

XIAODA XIAO was arrested in 1971 for tearing a poster of Mao and was sentenced to a five-year prison term as a counterrevolutionary. As a result, he spent the next seven years in a prison labor reform brigade on an island in Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province. He came to Amherst, MA, in the spring of 1989 shortly before the break-out of the democratic movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where he lives with his wife. He has published stories based on his prison experience during the last years of Mao’s regime in China in various magazines in the U.S., among them, The Atlantic Monthly.

The Cave Man should be out in the Fall of 2009.

Francis Levy - The Nerve Interview.

Interviewer Joseph Lazauskas of Nerve sat down with Francis Levy, author of Erotomania: A Romance, to discuss meaty fodder, such as the animalistic sex portrayed in the novel, monogamy, and the author's wife's reaction to the book.

He revisits the central topic weighing heavily on voters minds in recent days, a subject originally breached by the Village Voice: "Might golden showers be the blowjobs of tomorrow?" ("Whatever works, works.")

Lazauskas continues: "Though this is Levy's first novel, his background is in humor writing, and Erotomania wields a comedic punch that makes it, above all, a fun novel to read."