Bookforum excerpts Xiao's THE CAVE MAN.

The summer issue of Bookforum is out now with a special section called 'Fiction Forward' that spotlights work from forthcoming novels or story collections by young or emerging writers.

We're really proud to have a novel that we're publishing this December, called The Cave Man, by a talented writer named Xiaoda Xiao, included in the issue.

We're equally elated to have Jay Neugeboren (1940) write the introduction to the excerpt:

"Xiaoda Xiao, author of The Cave Man (Two Dollar Radio), emigrated from China to the United States in the spring of 1988, shortly before the breakout of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, leaving his wife behind; it would be two years before they would be allowed to reunite. He came from Suzhou and arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts, where it was my good fortune to become his teacher and friend. Xiao is—no hyperbole here—an extraordinarily gifted man: a concert violinist, a Ping-Pong champion, a trained architect, an inventor (with patents on file and products in the marketplace), a master chef, a music teacher, and a widely published writer (in China; this is his debut in the United States). He is also a survivor of seven years of forced labor on an island in Taihu Lake in Jiangsu province, where he served in one of Mao’s infamous prison labor-reform brigades. In The Cave Man, Xiao displays a splendid voice, one all his own. Like Solzhenitsyn, he has transformed his camp experience into sublimely vivid fiction. And like Kafka, Xiao memorably conjures a mad, surreal world, along with its potential both for cruelty and for kindness. In Ja Feng, Xiao’s protagonist, we have a man, released from solitary confinement, who must now make sense of ordinary life, which turns out to be at least as surreal and terrifying as the prison that was long his home. A masterful storyteller, Xiao offers us a gorgeously crafted, haunting tale rich in narrative invention as well as character. The Cave Man is as luminous as it is severe, and it will have a transformative effect on those fortunate enough to read it."

The entire excerpt is available online: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_02/3883

NOG Posters (not for sale).

Michael Silverblatt Interviews Gary Indiana.

Wow. Silverblatt praises Gary Indiana about his writing and new novel, The Shanghai Gesture, on KCRW's Bookworm today.

Consider:

"[Gary Indiana] is the primary reporter of the underground, the dissociation of cultures, the new behaviors; there is a sense that if you want to understand what has happened in America, you would have to read Gary Indiana. And this newest book is a leap forward."

Follow the link to listen to the rest...

Indiana on Silverblatt's Bookworm

"Out of fantasias of the past (Fu Manchu novels, exotic Hollywood films, documents of "friendly" imperialism from the twenties to the forties), Gary Indiana concocts the nightmare present of The Shanghai Gesture, a book that takes the current fashion for apocalyptic dystopias to unprecedented levels of fear and loathing."

Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm radio show, has interviewed Gary Indiana on his new novel. The interview will air on May 14. You can listen to the show streaming on the web, or download as a podcast shortly thereafter.

Village Voice: The Unlikely Triumph of Two Dollar Radio

"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..."

New Spring/Summer 2009 Catalog Online

Two Dollar Twitter

We finally broke down and joined Twitter.

[Long sigh.]

The Shanghai Gesture Now Available as a Serialized Audio Book From BOMB & AIR

An Audio Book of Gary Indiana reading from his first novel since 2003's Do Everything In The Dark, The Shanghai Gesture, is now available as a podcast from BOMB Magazine and Art International Radio.

Shanghai Gesture a Village Voice 'Spring Book Pick'

The Shanghai Gesture, a novel by Gary Indiana (April), was selected by the Village Voice as a "Spring Book Pick."

They say:

"This enormously playful seventh novel from Gary Indiana is a riff on Sax Rohmer's infamously effeminate and evil villain, Fu Manchu, and the two "medicament"-addicted Sherlock Holmes types who attempt to stop him. The sarcastic, unyielding fury that permeated last year's criticism collection Utopia's Debris is here, too, but sublimated: Narcolepsy, an astonishingly degraded Holiday Inn, and a ship called The Ardent Somdomite feature prominently."

Some Things That Meant the World to Me -- Starred Review

Joshua Mohr's first review for his first novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me (we'll be releasing his second novel June 2010), is a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Here's a snippet:

"Mohr's first novel is biting and heartbreaking, a piercing look at the indelible scars a violent past has left on a young man named Rhonda. The disturbing narrative engine - Rhonda's renaming and reimagining of the world around him to fit into his damaged logic - keeps the story creepily moving as it touches on homebrew prison wine and Rhonda's friendship with his childhood self, little-Rhonda. Mohr uses punchy, tightly wound prose to pull readers into a nightmarish landscape, but he never loses the heart of his story; it's as touching as it is shocking."

Erotomania's Spanish Cover.

Erotomania: A Romance is to be published in Spain by Tusquets Editores.

2 ForeWord Book of the Year Finalists.

1940, by Jay Neugeboren, is a finalist for historical fiction in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards.

The Drop Edge of Yonder, by Rudolph Wurlitzer, is a finalist for literary fiction in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards.

Winners will be announced at Book Expo America, late-May. Stay tuned...

James Gibbons Hits Nail on Head in Bookforum review of The Shanghai Gesture

James Gibbons provides a tremendously enthusiastic review of The Shanghai Gesture, by Gary Indiana, in the April / May issue of Bookforum, bestowing the book (and author) with some much-deserved praise:

"An uproarious, confounding, turbocharged fantasia that manages, alongside all its imaginative bravura, to hold up to our globalized epoch the fun-house mirror it deserves.

"This most socially astute writer has fashioned a riotous artifact that is both self-contained and self-consuming; The Shanghai Gesture is at once a wicked riposte to contemporary failings and an aesthete's hallucinatory folktale. That the writing can balance Indiana's thoroughgoing pessimism with a yarn of such imaginative buoyancy is not the least of its achievements."

The book is now available for sale through various booksellers, as well as through our website.

Drop Edge in The Believer's Top 20.

The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer was praised by readers of The Believer as one of the "strongest works of fiction published in 2008."

Apparently, once all the tabs were tabulated and all the hanging chads were swept under the doormat, they found it to be the 19th highest vote-getter.

Over at The Believer website, they have the top twenty books in the reader survey arranged, before listing what appear to be the next 30 or 40 in no apparent order.

Boom goes the dynamite.

RHONDA.

There are actually three Rhondas (that I know of) wandering the fictive literary galaxy and all three can actually be found in one book: Joshua Mohr's debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me. There is little-boy Rhonda, old-lady Rhonda, and Rhonda (a 30-year old man).

As Donald Ray Pollock mentioned in his blurb for the book, "[Rhonda] is one of the most troubled and heartbreaking people you will ever encounter in literature." Though which Rhonda in particular he refers to is uncertain. Read the book and find out.

The author got the name tattooed on his arm.