Download or read book How To Get Into the Twin Palms written by Karolina Waclawiak and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Waclawiak's novel reinvents the immigration story. How to Get Into the Twin Palms movingly portrays a protagonist intent on both creating and destroying herself, on burning brightly even as she goes up in smoke." -New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "The novel is beautifully written and so suffused with loneliness it makes you ache. Not only is How to Get into the Twin Palms about the overwhelming state that is displacement, it's about what happens when loneliness becomes unbearable. Waclawiak writes through these tensions so elegantly, so tenderly, that How to Get Into the Twin Palms is, by far, one of my favorite books this year." -The Rumpus "Masked by scenes of schmancy nightlife is a story about an immigrant wanting to belong. Barely getting by in LA on bingo-calling, Anya reinvents herself. With hair dye and a push-up bra, she tries to gain entry into the Twin Palms nightclub." -Marie Claire "A taut debut... [that] strikes with the creeping suddenness of a brush fire." -Publishers Weekly (*starred*) How to Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living alone in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, who struggles to retain her parents’ Polish culture while trying to assimilate into her newly adopted community. Anya stalks the nearby Twin Palms nightclub, the pinnacle of exclusivity in the Russian community. Desperate not only to gain entrance into the club but to belong there, Anya begins a perilous pursuit for Lev, a Russian gangster who frequents the seemingly impenetrable world of the Twin Palms. Karolina Waclawiak received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She is Deputy Editor of The Believer and lives and writes in Brooklyn.

Download or read book How to Get Into the Twin Palms written by Karolina Waclawiak and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Waclawiak's novel reinvents the immigration story. How to Get Into the Twin Palms movingly portrays a protagonist intent on both creating and destroying herself, on burning brightly even as she goes up in smoke." -New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "The novel is beautifully written and so suffused with loneliness it makes you ache. Not only is How to Get into the Twin Palms about the overwhelming state that is displacement, it's about what happens when loneliness becomes unbearable. Waclawiak writes through these tensions so elegantly, so tenderly, that How to Get Into the Twin Palms is, by far, one of my favorite books this year." -The Rumpus "Masked by scenes of schmancy nightlife is a story about an immigrant wanting to belong. Barely getting by in LA on bingo-calling, Anya reinvents herself. With hair dye and a push-up bra, she tries to gain entry into the Twin Palms nightclub." -Marie Claire "A taut debut... that] strikes with the creeping suddenness of a brush fire." -Publishers Weekly (*starred*) How to Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living alone in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, who struggles to retain her parents' Polish culture while trying to assimilate into her newly adopted community. Anya stalks the nearby Twin Palms nightclub, the pinnacle of exclusivity in the Russian community. Desperate not only to gain entrance into the club but to belong there, Anya begins a perilous pursuit for Lev, a Russian gangster who frequents the seemingly impenetrable world of the Twin Palms. Karolina Waclawiak received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She is Deputy Editor of The Believer and lives and writes in Brooklyn.

Download or read book The Invaders written by Karolina Waclawiak and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of a summer in a wealthy Connecticut community, a forty-something woman and her college-age stepson’s lives fall apart in a series of violent shocks. Cheryl has never been the right kind of country-club wife. She's always felt like an outsider, and now, in her mid-forties—facing the harsh realities of aging while her marriage disintegrates and her troubled stepson, Teddy, is kicked out of college—she feels cast adrift by the sparkling seaside community of Little Neck Cove, Connecticut. So when Teddy shows up at home just as a storm brewing off the coast threatens to destroy the precarious safe haven of the cove, she joins him in an epic downward spiral. The Invaders, a searing follow-up to Karolina Waclawiak’s critically acclaimed debut novel, How to Get Into the Twin Palms, casts a harsh light on the glossy sheen of even the most “perfect” lives in America's exclusive beach communities. With sharp wit and dark humor, The Invaders exposes the lies and insecurities that run like faultlines through our culture, threatening to pitch bored housewives, pill-popping children, and suspicious neighbors headlong into the suburban abyss.

Download or read book Life Events written by Karolina Waclawiak and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Buzzfeed's 29 Books We Couldn't Put Down This Year “Every page of this novel is a point of no return; once you’ve read Karolina Waclawiak's Life Events, you will never see life, death, grief, and healing the same way.”—Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives A woman at a crossroads learns the only way to reclaim her life is to help others die Karolina Waclawiak’s breakout novel, Life Events, follows Evelyn, who, at thirty-seven, is on the verge of divorce and anxiously dreading the death of everyone she loves. She combats her existential crisis by avoiding her husband and aimlessly driving along the freeways of California looking for an escape—one that eventually comes when she discovers a collective of “exit guides.” Evelyn enrolls in their training course, where she learns to provide companionship and a final exit for terminally ill patients seeking a conscious departure. She meets Daphne, a dying woman still full of life; Lawrence, an aging porn king; and Daniel, who seems too young to die and whom Evelyn falls for, despite knowing better, not to mention the exit guide code. Each client opens something new in Evelyn, allowing her a chance to access her own grief and confront the self-destructive ways she suppresses her pain. When Evelyn travels through the Southwest to an afterlife convention to further her death education, she must finally face her complicated relationship with her alcoholic father and reconcile her life choices. Sensitively observed and darkly funny, Life Events is a moving, enlivening story of the human condition: the doldrums of loneliness, the consuming regret of past mistakes, and the thrill, finally, of finding meaning—and love—where you least expect it.

Download or read book White Dialogues written by Bennett Sims and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2017-09-17 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19 *Named one of the Best Books of the Year —Bookforum Synopsis With all the brilliance, bravado, and wit of his award-winning debut, A Questionable Shape, Bennett Sims returns with an equally ambitious and wide-ranging collection of stories. A house-sitter alone in a cabin in the woods comes to suspect that the cabin may need to be “unghosted.” A raconteur watches as his personal story is rewritten on an episode of This American Life. And in the collection’s title story, a Hitchcock scholar sitting in on a Vertigo lecture is gradually driven mad by his own theory of cinema. In these eleven stories, Sims moves from slow-burn psychological horror to playful comedy, bringing us into the minds of people who are haunted by their environments, obsessions, and doubts. Told in electric, insightful prose, White Dialogues is a profound exploration of the way we uncover meaning in a complex, and sometimes terrifying, world. It showcases Sims’s rare talent and confirms his reputation as one of the most exciting young writers at work today.

Download or read book The Vine That Ate the South written by J.D. Wilkes and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening," where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice—the one and only, Carver Canute—set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine. Their quest leads them face to face with albino panthers, Great Dane-riding girls, protective property owners, and just about every American folk-demon ever, while forcing the protagonist to finally take stock of his relationship with his father and the man's mysterious disappearance. The Vine That Ate the South is a mesmerizing fantasia where Wilkes ambitiously grapples with the contradictions of the contemporary American South while subversively considering how well we know our own family and friends.

Download or read book They Can t Kill Us Until They Kill Us written by Hanif Abdurraqib and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * 2018 "12 best books to give this holiday season" —TODAY (Elizabeth Acevedo) * A "Best Book of 2017" —Rolling Stone (2018), NPR, Buzzfeed, Paste Magazine, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC, Stereogum, National Post, Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot, Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Daily * American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads' * Midwest Indie Bestseller In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of Black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.

Download or read book The Drop Edge of Yonder written by Rudolph Wurlitzer and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Drop Edge of Yonder is an adventurous book that explores the truth and temptations of the American myth. Beginning in the savage wilds of Colorado in the waning days of the fur trade, the story follows Zebulon Shook, a mountain man who has had a curse placed on him by a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he murdered. The book follows Zebulon as he encounters people obsessed with greed and the politics of expansion. The trail takes him from Colorado to the remote reaches of the Northwest, a journey that traverses the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Far from being simply a “western,” The Drop Edge of Yonder focuses on a time that could be considered the starting point of American capitalism and expansionism, and has led Judith Thurman to refer to the book as “a subversive modern novel about the bounds of love and the discontents of civilized life.” The Drop Edge of Yonder originated as a screenplay treatment that intrigued Hollywood folk such as Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, Yves Simeneau, Jim Jarmusch, Roger Spotiswoode, Alex Cox, and Richard Gere, before being adapted and expanded into this original novel by Wurlitzer.

Download or read book Palaces written by Simon Jacobs and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jacobs’s terrifying debut novel is a master class in anxiety and atmosphere. Jacobs creates a setting that fans of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy will enjoy while still offering up fresh frights, including a wolf in the foyer, a screaming child in the closet, and a knife that keeps showing up, no matter how many times John throws it away. Jacobs is a writer to watch; his talent for crafting an immersive, scary narrative is undeniable." —Publishers Weekly, starred review John and Joey are a young couple immersed in their local midwestern punk scene, who after graduating college sever all ties and move to a perverse and nameless northeastern coastal city. They drift in and out of art museums, basement shows, and derelict squats seemingly unfazed as the city slowly slides into chaos around them. Late one night, forced out of their living space, John and Joey are driven to take shelter in a chain pharmacy before emerging to a city in full-scale riot. They find themselves the only passengers on a commuter train headed north, and exit at the final stop to discover the area entirely devoid of people. As John and Joey negotiate their future through bizarre, troubling manifestations of the landscape and a succession of abandoned mansions housing only scant clues to their owners' strange and sudden disappearance, they're also forced to confront the resurgent violence and buried memories of their shared past. With incisive precision and a cool detachment, Simon Jacobs has crafted a surreal and spellbinding first novel of horror and intrigue.

Download or read book Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction written by Grażyna J. Kozaczka and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though often unnoticed by scholars of literature and history, Polish American women have for decades been fighting back against the patriarchy they encountered in America and the patriarchy that followed them from Poland. Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction traces the evolution of this struggle and women’s efforts to construct gendered and classed ethnicity. Focusing predominantly on work by North American born and immigrant authors that represents the Polish American Catholic tradition, Grażyna J. Kozaczka puts texts in conversation with other American ethnic literatures. She positions ethnic gender construction and performance at an intersection of social class, race, and sex. She explores the marginalization of ethnic female characters in terms of migration studies, theories of whiteness, and the history of feminist discourse. Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction tells the complex story of how Polish American women writers have shown a strong awareness of their oppression and sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.

Download or read book Melting Pots Mosaics Children of Immigrants in US American Literature written by Rüdiger Heinze and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2017-12-31 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decades, children of immigrants have drawn increased attention not only in press and media, but also in a number of academic fields, among them sociology, history, or ethnology. Surprisingly, literary and cultural studies have been somewhat more reluctant to approach the topic. While there is work on individual authors or, at the very most, particular ethnic groups, comparative approaches are rare. This monograph aims to amend this. It provides an extensive discussion of US-American literature about children of immigrants, comparing different authors, different ethnic groups and different literary and historical contexts.

Download or read book The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing written by Nicholas Rombes and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: p>*A Best Book of 2014 —Flavorwire, Entropy Magazine, Book Riot "The novel is an attempt to write about film through fiction, engaging both art forms at once with the analytic mind of the academic and the imagination of the storyteller. In the process, Rombes found the freedom of fiction pushing him towards a new type of writing. For the reader, there is little we can know for sure, but this is what makes the book so exciting." —Irish Times Synopsis 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.

Download or read book Binary Star written by Sarah Gerard and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist. *A Best Book of 2015 —NPR, BuzzFeed,Vanity Fair, Flavorwire, Largehearted Boy "Rhythmic, hallucinatory, yet vivid as crystal. Gerard has channeled her trials and tribulations into a work of heightened reality, one that sings to the lonely gravity of the human body." —NPR 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. "The particular genius of Binary Star is that out of such grim material in constructs beauty. It's like a novel-shaped poem about addiction, codependence and the relentlessness of the everyday, a kind of elegy of emptiness." —New York Times Book Review

Download or read book I Smile Back written by Amy Koppelman and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Powerful. Koppelman's instincts help her navigate these choppy waters with inventiveness and integrity."—Los Angeles Times "Koppelman explores with ruthless honesty a woman come undone."—Bookslut "Koppelman mostly 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."—Elle Now a major motion picture starring Sarah Silverman in her dramatic-acting debut, and Josh Charles, I Smile Back tells the affecting tale of Laney Brooks, a mother and wife on a self-destructive streak. She takes the drugs she wants, sleeps with the men she wants, disappears when she wants. Lurking beneath Laney's seemingly composed surface is the impulse to follow in her father's footsteps, to leave and topple her family's balance in the process. The film adaptation of I Smile Back premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the prestigious US Dramatic competition. Silverman's affecting dramatic turn in the lead role has garnered praise in film trade reviews as "tremendous," "terrific," and "awards worthy," and will inspire an onslaught of attention upon the film's national theatrical release. Amy Koppelman is a graduate of Columbia's MFA program. Her writing has appeared in the New York Observer and Lilith. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children, and is the author of the novels A Mouthful of Air and I Smile Back. She adapted the screenplay for the film from her own novel.

Download or read book Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky written by David Connerley Nahm and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wonderful. While this isn't a thriller, at least in any traditional sense of the word, it's deeply suspenseful. [Nahm's] descriptions of rural Kentucky are gorgeous, but he digs far below the surface to portray the real soul of the town. Remarkable... it's impossible to stop reading until you've gone through each beautiful line, a beauty that infuses the whole novel, even in its darkest moments." -NPR "Haunting." -Chicago Tribune "Absorbing. There's an arch beauty to Nahm's prose. One feels to be discovering the story rather than just receiving it." -Star Tribune "It's the prose that makes this suspenseful first novel unforgettable. Like a pointillist painting, Nahm's writing daubs image upon image to construct an impressionistic view of life in a small town. A powerful first novel, the kind that makes you want to stop people in the street to tell them about it." -Library Journal, STARRED "David Connerley Nahm's Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky knows that all true stories are ghost stories, full of horror and want, distance and loss—the lasting specters of the tales we tell ourselves to mask the long truths that refuse to let us go." -Matt Bell 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. David Connerley Nahm was born and raised in a small town in central Kentucky. Currently, he lives in the mountains of Virginia where he practices law and teaches law and literature at James Madison University. His short stories have appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Eyeshot, and on McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Download or read book Without Sanctuary written by James Allen and published by Twin Palms Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gruesome photographs document the victims of lynchings and the society that allowed mob violence.

Download or read book Crapalachia written by Scott McClanahan and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Scott McClanahan was fourteen he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Crapalachia is a portrait of these formative 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. Scott McClanahan is the author of Stories II and Stories V! His fiction has appeared in BOMB, Vice, and New York Tyrant. His novel Hill William is forthcoming from Tyrant Books.