3.28 avg rating — 290 ratings

"Brandon leaves his boyfriend in the city for life in the mountains after an affair with a professor ends with Brandon killing a research animal. His new neighbors are staging an ambitious agricultural project thanks to changes in the climate, and Brandon gets swept along with their plans. However, he learns that these changes—internal, external—are irreversible."

3.84 avg rating — 32 ratings

"Salome Jensen is three years old when she is taken from her home by the man who fixes the hot water heater. As Sal drifts through Laundromats and other people’s homes, she develops a perspective of the world and an understanding of its people more meaningful than the most erudite observer could muster."

3.94 avg rating — 31 ratings

"Laney Brooks acts out. Married with kids, she takes the drugs she wants, sleeps with the men she wants, disappears when she wants. Lurking beneath Laney's composed surface is the destructive impulse to follow in the footsteps of her father, to leave and topple her family's balance in the process. "

4.10 avg rating — 3,199 ratings

"When Scott McClanahan was 14 he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Crapalachia is a portrait of these formidable years, coming of age in rural West Virginia.

Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana. "

3.95 avg rating — 836 ratings

"Mira Corpora is the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson, an inspired, dreamlike adventure by a distinctive new talent.

Literary and inventive, but also fast-paced and gripping, Mira Corpora charts the journey of a young runaway. A coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, featuring a colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar.

With astounding precision, Jackson weaves a moving tale of discovery and self-preservation across a startling, vibrant landscape."

3.75 avg rating — 8 ratings

"The latest installment of Frequencies follows Mailer and George Plimpton to Vienna, for a staged reading of ‘Zelda,’ based on correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds; D. Foy tracks krump, from street-art to reality television; Antonia Crane on being down-and-out in San Francisco, and a discussion between photographer Lynn Davis and husband, Rudolph Wurlitzer."

3.99 avg rating — 464 ratings

"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 the joint’s first (and only) art show by Sylvia Suture, an ambitious young artist who longs to take her act to the dramatic precipice of 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; and Owen, donning his Santa costume to mask the most unfortunate birthmark imaginable."

3.96 avg rating — 262 ratings

"Termite Parade tells the story of Mired, the self-described "bastard daughter of a menage a trois between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath, and Eeyore." Mired catalogs her "museum of emotional failures," the latest entry to which is her boyfriend Derek, an auto mechanic (whose body may or may not be infested with termites), who loses his cool carrying her up the stairs to their apartment."

3.54 avg rating — 485 ratings

"Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people.



The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they’ve been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger.



Haints Stay is a new Acid Western in the tradition of Rudolph Wurlitzer, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man: meaning it is brutal, surreal, and possesses an unsettling humor."

3.25 avg rating — 67 ratings

"Set on the eve of America's entry into World War Two and built around a fascinating historical figure, Dr. Eduard Bloch, an Austrian doctor who was the only Jew for whom Hitler ever personally arranged departure from Europe.

1940 focuses on Dr. Bloch's relationship with Elizabeth Rofman, a medical illustrator who has come to New York to visit her father, only to find that he has, mysteriously, disappeared. The story grows more complex when Elizabeth's son Daniel, a disturbed young adolescent, escapes from the institution in Maryland where his parents have committed him."

3.94 avg rating — 34 ratings

"A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land’s End, a funk endemic to the region since the wreckage a century earlier of the ship, the Ardent Somdomite. Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort, Dr. Obregon Petrie, attempt to thwart Fu Manchu’s latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American Piyas, matching wits with a club-footed ex-Stasi, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug dependencies."

3.91 avg rating — 34 ratings

"Frequencies: Volume 2 features original work by Sara Finnerty on ghosts, Roxane Gay on issues of belonging in Middle Class Black America, Alex Jung on the gay sex trade in Thailand, Kate Zambreno on Barbara Loden, and more to come! "

3.55 avg rating — 173 ratings

"Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends – three men and two women – head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. They’ve been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their relationships defined by these wild times.

After a car accident leaves one friend sick and dying, and severe weather traps them at the cabin, there is nowhere to go, forcing them to finally and ultimately take stock and confront their past transgressions, considering what they mean to one another and themselves.

With some of the most luminous and purple prose flexed in recent memory, D. Foy is an incendiary new voice and Made to Break, a grand, episodic debut, redolent of the stark conscience of Denis Johnson and the spellbinding vision of Roberto Bolaño. "

3.89 avg rating — 849 ratings

"When Rhonda was a child – abandoned and ignored by his mother; abused and misguided by his mother’s boyfriend – he imagined the rooms of his home drifting apart from one another like separating continents. Years later, after an embarassing episode as an adult, Rhonda’s inner-child appears, leading him to a trapdoor in a most unlikely place that will force him to finally confront his troubled past."

3.76 avg rating — 657 ratings

"Radio Iris is the story of Iris Finch, a socially awkward daydreamer with a job as the receptionist/personal assistant to an eccentric and increasingly absent businessman. When Iris is not sitting behind her desk waiting for the phone to ring, she makes occasional stabs at connection with the earth and the people around her through careful observation and insomniac daydreams, always more watcher than participant as she shuttles between her one-bedroom apartment and the office she inhabits so completely, yet has never quite understood.

Her world cracks open with the discovery of “the man next door.” Over the next few weeks or months (the passage of time is iffy for Iris), she takes it upon herself to learn everything she can about this stranger. But the closer she gets to him, the more troubling questions at the heart of her own life rise to the surface, questions like - Why does she keep having the same dream? Why is it that she and her brother don’t seem to have a single shared memory of their childhood? What is it her boss actually does? In the end, Iris is faced with a choice she never imagined, and a reality she never knew enough to dread."

3.72 avg rating — 140 ratings

"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. "

3.66 avg rating — 166 ratings

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

3.59 avg rating — 1,287 ratings

"Inez wanders a post-pandemic world, strangely immune to disease, making her living by volunteering as a test subject. She is hired to provide genetic material to a grief-stricken, affluent mother, who lost all four of her daughters within four short weeks. This experimental genetic work is policed by a hazy network of governmental Ethics committees, and threatened by the Knights of Life, religious zealots who raze the rural farms where much of this experimentation is done.



When the mother backs out at the last minute, Inez is left responsible for the product, which in this case is a baby girl, Ani. Inez must protect Ani, who is a scientific breakthrough, keeping her alive, dodging authorities and religious fanatics, and trying to provide Ani with the chilldhood tha Inez never had, which means a stable home and an education.



With a stylish voice, The Only Ones is a time-old story, tender and iconic, about how much we love our children, however they come, as well as a sly commentary on class, politics, and the complexities of reproductive technology."

3.72 avg rating — 134 ratings

"Epic wildfires are snaking through the Sapphires and the Bitterroots, closing in on the valley. The entire west is seemingly ablaze when James hitchhikes to Missoula, in search of clues to his father’s mysterious death two decades earlier.

Ruth traded a dead-end life in Minneapolis for a dead-end life in Missoula. But in Missoula, she’s got Bridget. “[Bridget] was gorgeous... but that wasn’t it, that didn’t quite explain it. What explained it was the curse. The curse of the unreasonably pretty, the curse of cult leaders and dictators. It sucked everyone to her, it consumed her, made her untouchable.”

After a local girl dies at a party, signaling the end of fun for the twentysomethings of Missoula, James and Ruth become involved. But jealousy over Bridget quickly complicates things.

Nothing announces an assertive new voice, while also capturing the angst and foreboding that could mark it as an even grander generational statement. "

3.42 avg rating — 455 ratings

"Remy is a young girl who lives in a town that believes in crystal count: that you are born with one-hundred crystals inside and throughout your life, through accidents and illness, your count is depleted until you reach zero.

As a city encroaches daily on the village, threatening their antiquated life, and the Earth grows warmer, Remy sets out to accomplish something no one else has: to increase her sick mother’s crystal count.

An allegory, fable, touching family saga and poetic sci-fi adventure, Shane Jones underlines his reputation as an inspired and unique visionary. "

3.64 avg rating — 189 ratings

"Ja Feng is contained within a three-foot by four-and-one-half-foot 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 most basic thoughts and perceptions.

The Cave Man follows Ja Feng once 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."

3.60 avg rating — 626 ratings

"Flats is a post-apocalyptic exploration of the human self. Submerged amidst a cast of faceless characters named after ruined American cities who compete over a shrinking fringe of space, Flats is a modern masterpiece of the counterculture.

Quake chronicles the unraveling of society after an earthquake strikes ’60s Los Angeles. By painting a bleak picture of what people are capable of doing to one another in extreme circumstances, Quake is nihilistic and haunting, as well as uncomfortably foreboding. And more relevant than ever. "

3.62 avg rating — 56 ratings

"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, Jay Neugeboren examines the great mysteries and complexities that unsettle and comprise human relationships."

3.70 avg rating — 100 ratings

"Charlie Eisner is a journeyman whose friend Nick convinces him to move to Singapore, where he falls in love with the vibrant and endangered world of nearby Borneo. One night, at a party in Nick’s Singapore apartment, Nick dies mysteriously, prompting Charlie to return to New England, where he discovers that Seana O’Sullivan has moved in with his father, Max, a retired professor with a beguiling and antic disposition. Seana, one of his father’s former students, is a wildly successful and provocative writer who is equally wild and provocative in life. Together, she and Charlie set out on a road trip, first to pay respects to Nick’s parents, and then on a journey where “weird things happen if you make room for them.”

From the lush forests of Borneo to the mean streets of Brooklyn and the haunting towns of coastal Maine, The Other Side of the World is a grand, episodic novel and yet another virtuoso performance by one of America’s most revered living writers. "

3.63 avg rating — 198 ratings

"In the mid-'90s a rare-film librarian at a state university in Pennsylvania mysteriously burned his entire stockpile of film canisters and disappeared. Roberto Acestes Laing was highly regarded by acclaimed directors around the globe for his keen eye, appreciation for eccentricity, and creativity in interpretation.



Unsure at first whether Laing is a pseudonym or some sort of Hollywood boogeyman, a journalist manages to track the forgotten man down to a motel on the fringe of the Wisconsin wilds. Laing agrees to speak with the journalist, but only through the lens of the cinema. What ensues is an atmospheric, cryptic extrapolation of movies and how they intertwine with life, and the forgotten films that curse the lost librarian still."

3.62 avg rating — 53 ratings

"Frequencies is edited and published by Two Dollar Radio. New issues will release every Spring and Fall, and will feature roughly five essays or interviews. There will be no empty calories in the form of music or book reviews, just the essays themselves, which will hopefully total a really taut arena for writers to showcase their work. "

3.60 avg rating — 579 ratings

"Vagabond Blues is an insider's peek at minor league football in the early '80s, an entire netherworld that most people never had the opportunity to see, let alone experience. It's a place where players hopped up on speed and painkillers injure one another for no other reason than because they can. They are drunks and drug-users, Vietnam Vets and NFL misfits, who try just as hard to keep the adrenaline rush going after the game. "

3.51 avg rating — 105 ratings

"Walker Linchuk is an aged writer and author of the Complete Series (The Complete Book of Aids, 9/11, Terrorism) whose name has often been discussed as a strong possibility for the Nobel Prize, suffering from a seven month plague of writer's block that New York Magazine says, "for candor and anguish, surpasses any we have on record." One morning Linchuk wakes to find a crust in his nose - the "definitive crust of his life" - that awakens him to a new world of desire and enlightenment. "

3.46 avg rating — 1,091 ratings

"How To Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, who struggles between retaining her parents' Polish culture and trying to assimilate into her adopted community. She lusts after Lev, a Russian man who frequents the Twin Palms nightclub down the block from Anya's apartment. It is Anya's wish to gain entrance to this seeminly exclusive club. How To Get Into the Twin Palms is a really funny and often moving book that provides a unique twist on the immigrant story, and provides a credible portrait of the city of Los Angeles, literally burning to the ground. "

3.41 avg rating — 369 ratings

"Leah’s little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears and the stories told to quell them.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky reads as though Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson wrote a more focused Antwerp and based it in central Kentucky. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book."

3.25 avg rating — 2,223 ratings

"The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.



With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road-trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction.



Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success."

3.67 avg rating — 18 ratings

"80's hair metal band Savage Night is living the rockstar fantasy. All that changes when the band learns they owe more money than they have. The Drummer chooses to shave his head, take the next flight back to the States, torch the mansion that his stripper ex-girlfriend designed, and fake his own death.

15 years after their tragic collapse, the Singer of Savage Night has tracked down the Drummer in hopes of convincing him to come out of hiding for a reunion tour and second shot at glory. The chase is on, as the press, the Feds, and former bandmates hunt the Drummer down the streets of New Orleans. A novel soaked in sex, drugs, and tequila, The Drummer is a stiff cocktail of crotch-grabbing hair-metal and New Orleans noir. "

3.43 avg rating — 28 ratings

"A comedic, absurdist portrait of a modern-day romance, Erotomania traces the development of James and Monica, from a couple that is forced to move to a nuclear fall-out bunker so their explosive sex life doesn't physically harm their neighbors, to James' one-night bout with alcoholism, to Monica's sexually-fueled obsession with abstractionist expressionism, to marriage counseling, to a new-found reliance on reality television and microwaveable meals."

3.33 avg rating — 6 ratings

"After drifting out of his current band, Ivor must face that window cleaning is no longer his day job - it's his only job; he's not going to be a rock star after all. This, despite having played in such ground-breaking punk bands as S.O.A. with Henry Rollins, Faith, and Embrace with Ian Mackaye."

3.60 avg rating — 5 ratings

"
Colin Asher plays dominos in the Mission!



Ruth Gila Berger on evolving life plans and the shaping of a new American family!



Charles Hastings, Jr., on factory work-a-day life in Alabama!



Nathan Knapp on teenage romance in the days of dial-up!



Joshua Mohr on men and boys!



Plus: Carola Dibbell, Sarah Gerard, Jeff Jackson, Shane Jones, Nicholas Rombes, and Karolina Waclawiak on their first concert experience!



EXCLUSIVE: An exclusive satirical (fictional!) interview with Shia LaBeouf, in which the rapscallion speaks his mind!"

3.27 avg rating — 179 ratings

"Baby Geisha is a collection of thirteen sexually-charged stories that roam from the Coney Island Ferris wheel to the Greek Isles.

True to Dalton’s form, the stories in Baby Geisha are distinctly imagined while also representing a more grounded approach in the author’s style. There’s the Joan Didion-obsessed starving journalist of 'Pura Vida,' struggling to maintain a relationship with her performance artist sisters (or anyone, for that matter), on assignment in Costa Rica to write an article on sloth-hugging. 'Millennium Chill' is about a woman who discovers that her body heat is mysteriously linked to that of an elderly beggar.

Baby Geisha serves to underline Dalton’s reputation as a remarkable stylist and original artist. "

3.10 avg rating — 348 ratings

"In The Correspondence Artist, an unremarkable woman has been carrying on with an internationally recognized artist, largely via e-mail. To protect her paramour's identity, she creates a series of correspondent, alternative lovers in a self-destructing roman à clef."

liked it 3.00 avg rating — 2,060 ratings

"Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie envelope, smashed windows, and a pool of blood in his father’s house: the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father’s haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.

However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch’s father.

Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss."

2.90 avg rating — 79 ratings

"In Wurlitzer’s signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift through the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere. "

liked it 3.00 avg rating — 32 ratings

"First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham.

Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: Someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.)

I’m Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how we love and communicate with one another. "

3.12 avg rating — 647 ratings

"The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series of tragic love triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions of life, love, and death. "

2.97 avg rating — 32 ratings

"Kenny Cantor, always dapper in his seersucker suit from the Brooks Brothers 1818 collection, is a CPA, amateur psychoanalyst, and sex-tourist vacationing in Rio when he gets waylaid at a psychoanalytic conference.

What ensues is a provocative journey that merges sex and psychoanalysis through Rio’s tawdry netherworld of Sontag-quoting denizens as only an incendiary voice like Francis Levy could imagine."

3.64 avg rating — 111 ratings

"The Glacier is a spellbinding work of fiction that re-imagines the American frontier of the late-nineties and early-aughts, a time when cookie-cutter developments stamped the countryside beige. Following a caterer at a convention center, a surveyor residing in a storage unit, and the dazed and death-obsessed denizens of the burbs, The Glacier is a poetic rendering of the pre-apocalypse."

2.64 avg rating — 126 ratings

"Stagg is a historian researching imperial influence in 17th century Sri Lanka, who makes a living as a watchman in a factionalized America. When beaten prostitutes begin appearing, Stagg partners with Ravan, whose family studies weather modification. Their discoveries put a troubling complexion on Stagg's research, just as the weather modification project looks less about dispersing storms than weaponizing them."

3.38 avg rating — 415 ratings

4.24 avg rating — 506 ratings

3.83 avg rating — 1,631 ratings