Two Dollar Radio

“Lovers of the personal essay will be thrilled by this innovative collection.” —Publishers Weekly“In a horror movie, an infected character may hide a bite or rash, an urge, an unwellness. She might withdraw or act out, or behave as if nothing is the matter, nothing has happened. Any course of action opposite saying how she feels suggests suffering privately is preferable to the anticipated betrayal of being cast out.” Night Rooms is a poetic, intimate collection of personal essays that weaves together fragmented images from horror films and cultural tropes to meditate on anxiety and depression, suicide, body image, identity, grief, and survival.Whether competing in shopping mall beauty pageants, reflecting on childhood monsters and ballet lessons, or recounting dark cultural ephemera while facing grief and authenticity in the digital age, Gina Nutt’s shifting style echoes the sub-genres that Night Rooms highlights—spirit-haunted slow burns, possession tales, slashers, and revenge films with a feminist bent.Refracting life through the lens of horror films, Night Rooms masterfully leaps between reality and movies, past and present—because the “final girl’s” story is ultimately a survival story told another way.«Whether she’s uncovering connections between her homebuyer’s course and haunted house movies, her wedding anniversary and Victorian taxidermy tableaux, or her shopping mall’s glass elevator and destiny, Gina Nutt writes prose so astonishing I want to read it in an MRI machine just to confirm that every part of my brain indeed lit up. Night Rooms is a brilliant, beautiful, boundlessly inventive book.” —Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl

“This resilient heroine embodies the evolution of feminism in a male-dominant society, making this a poignant story for our time.” —Emily Park, Booklist starred review“Daring and unputdownable.” —Jenny Hollander, Marie ClaireThe Hare is an affecting portrait of Rosie Monroe, of her resilience and personal transformation under the pin of the male gaze.Raised to be obedient by a stern grandmother in a blue-collar town in Massachusetts, Rosie accepts a scholarship to art school in New York City in the 1980s. One morning at a museum, she meets a worldly man twenty years her senior, with access to the upper crust of New England society. Bennett is dashing, knows that “polo” refers only to ponies, teaches her which direction to spoon soup, and tells of exotic escapades with Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson. Soon, Rosie is living with him on a swanky estate on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, naively in sway to his moral ambivalence. A daughter — Miranda — is born, just as his current con goes awry forcing them to abscond in the middle of the night to the untamed wilderness of northern Vermont.Almost immediately, Bennett abandons them in an uninsulated cabin without a car or cash for weeks at a time, so he can tend a teaching job that may or may not exist at an elite college. Rosie is forced to care for her young daughter alone, and to tackle the stubborn intricacies of the wood stove, snowshoe into town, hunt for wild game, and forage in the forest. As Rosie and Miranda’s life gradually begins to normalize, Bennett’s schemes turn malevolent, and Rosie must at last confront his twisted deceptions. Her actions have far-reaching and perilous consequences.An astounding new literary thriller from a celebrated author at the height of her storytelling prowess, The Hare bravely considers a woman’s inherent sense of obligation — sexual and emotional — to the male hierarchy, and deserves to be part of our conversation as we reckon with #MeToo and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Rosie Monroe emerges as an authentic, tarnished feminist heroine.«With The Hare, Melanie Finn has written a powerful story of female perseverance, strength, and resilience. This book has rare qualities: beautiful writing while being absolutely unputdownable, and I will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know.” —Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange, Our Endless Numbered Days, and Swimming Lessons

“I couldn't wait to see what this irreverent baby naming book had between it's covers. It's funny and witty, and I love the interludes with name lists.” —Sarah Danforth, Towne Book Center and Wine Bar, Collegeville, PAUnless your child is an '80s villain, we can all agree that Brad, Todd, and Brandi with an “i” are all atrocious ideas. With all the swagger of the Palmyra Pumpkin Princess, the Two Dollar Radio Guide to Naming Your Baby will help you name your child by calling attention to those names you should probably definitely avoid: Kyle (Just because there was one in your first grade class, and two in your wedding, doesn’t mean there needs to be another one in your family photo), Kiefer (Grand Marshall of “Truck or Treat”), Paige (She’s never really going to get it, but you’re not gonna stop trying). While we can't promise your child will be a success, we can provide you with the tools necessary to ensure your child will not be an epic failure.Your friends are in the hospital, awaiting the arrival of their first child. You and your friends are eager to see a new member of your extended family enter the world. Then, you see the Instagram post: “Hey everyone, mom and son are doing fine. Happy and healthy! We want to introduce you to… KEITH."p>What do you say? I mean, you’re meant to say congratulations, but do they know? Keith is clearly step-dad’s name, and there have been no recorded Baby Keiths on record since the last time gas was 5 dollars a gallon. Is it ironic? Maybe it’s ironic. Like DadCore, but… a baby.With the Two Dollar Radio Guide to Naming Your Baby, you’ll find plenty of useful information to help you avoid blame when your full-grown Karen asks you why everyone asks her if she wants to ask to see a manager. Your Karen is into horses, we know, but that’s why you should have gone with Millie.Inside, you’ll find musings on all the worst monikers — even yours — which means you now have a new gift idea for your family members. Who needs 23andMe when, rather than finding out if you’re 2.7 percent Welsh, you can get to the bottom of why your cousin Dale Henry is an 8-year-old girl with an overbite, and not a grizzled country and western singer.For Example:* Fiona: Ahh, yes, you like Disney. Who doesn’t? But there are no actual princesses, and many Fionas grow up to become penpals with murderers and marry them in prison. You’re playing with fire.* Dylan: Can you still love your child if they grow up to send dick pics through LinkedIn?* Hailey: It’s hard to hear anyone say, “I’m not racist, but…” Especially when it’s a 14-year-old. Who wronged her? It was you.In this ever-changing world, it’s hard to know how life is going to turn out for your new— or soon-to-be-born. You can’t keep them from getting their heart broken. And you won’t be able to shield every force of evil from them over the course of their whole life. You will, however, be able to avoid naming them Harley. You will need our help.

The Two Dollar Radio Guide to Vegan Cooking is a distinctively imaginative spin on a cookbook that could only come from the minds at Two Dollar Radio, combining equal-parts vegan cheffing prowess, humorous stories of adventure and mystery, and punk rock. Imagine Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain. But focused on hyping vegan food. Crossed with Scooby Doo. A vegan diet is trending and Two Dollar Radio Headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, has become a vegan comfort food mecca thanks to celebrity chefs Jean-Claude van Randy and Speed Dog (with constructive criticism from Eric Obenauf). Join them in this guide as they craft delectable recipes, solve mysteries, and slay Vegan Hunger Demons.If you've searched online for a recipe, you've likely encountered a digressive treatise on family history or mundane childhood reflection, none of which actually has anything to do with how to make enchilada sauce. After extensive scrolling, you've really only uncovered that self-taught chef/blogger Linda needs to talk to a professional counselor about her relationship with her mother.In the Two Dollar Radio Guide to Vegan Cooking, executive vegan chefs Jean-Claude van Randy and Speed Dog (with constructive criticism from Eric Obenauf) unearth a fount of vegan cheffing knowledge. In addition to exquisite recipes and vegan life hacks, they, too, view food as a story: nary a meal is prepared without recalling when Speed Dog summited Old Goat Mountain in Banff, armed with nothing more than a sack full of cherry Ring Pops and a wily pack burro.The Two Dollar Radio Guide to Vegan Cooking is for you if:* You’re looking for satisfying comfort food;* You’re interested in a vegan diet but are having trouble giving up cheese;* You’re (vegan) fishing for accessible recipes that don’t requirehard-to-find ingredients you can’t pronounce;* You crave ADVENTURE.We are all explorers, vegan food explorers — join us on this culinary journey as we slay Vegan Hunger Demons.The recipes included in the Two Dollar Radio Guide to Vegan Cooking are:• Backyard Veggie Burger• Beer Brats• Breakfast Sando• Breakfast Tacos• Buffalo Queso• Calgary Carrot Lox Salad• Chile Relleno.• Classy Italian Casserole• Coconut Bacon• Devilish Cheezecake• Everything (but the Bagel) Carrot Lox Wrap• Farmhouse Ranch Dressing• Fishless Filets• Game-Day Chick’n Wangs• Gobbler Tortuga• Great Sausage Sammy• Hollandaise Sauce• Hot Sauce• Hummus• Leigh’s Late-Night Trip to Taco Town• Loaded Breakfast Tortuga• Maple-Frosted Cookie Dough Bars• Mayonnaise• Mexxxy Enchiladas• Nacho Mama’s Home Fries• (No) Crab Cakes Benedict• Not Even Lake Erie Perch Fishless Tacos• Pambazo• Pickled Onions• Roasted Garlic Enchilada Sauce• Salsa• Scallion Cheddar Cheeze Spread• Scandalous Tacos• Second Pair of Black Jeans Eggplant Po’ Boy• Slaw• Smoky Dojo Hot Sauce• Smoky Mozzarella Cheeze• Street Sauce• Sundried Tomatoes• Taco Mac & Cheeze Tortuga• Tacos Hermanos• Tartar Sauce• Tater Tots

“An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

«Alzayat’s slim, powerful debut collection showcases the author’s deep empathy and imagination in stories about grief, assimilation, and trauma… This intelligent collection is a force to be reckoned with.» —Publishers Weekly, starred reviewThe award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat’s collection, Alligator and Other Stories, are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman preforming burial rites for her brother in “Ghusl,” or the great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in “Once We Were Syrians.”Alzayat’s stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of “Only Those Who Struggle Succeed,” the New York City children on the lookout for a place to play on the heels of Etan Patz’s kidnapping in “Disappearance,” or the “dangerous” women of “The Daughters of Manāt” who struggle to assert their independence.The title story, “Alligator,” is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and intergenerational trauma, told in an epistolary format through social media posts, newspaper clippings, and testimonials, that starts with the true story of the lynching of a Syrian immigrant couple by law officers in small-town Florida. Placed in a wider context of U.S. racial violence, the extrajudicial deaths, and what happens to the couple’s children and their children’s children in the years after, challenges the demands of American assimilation and its limits.Alligator and Other Stories is haunting, spellbinding, and unforgettable, while marking Dima Alzayat’s arrival as a tremendously gifted new talent.“Dima Alzayat scrys the past, spinning narratives that are ahead of our time. War, politics and power come clashing together in these inventive stories that flit between styles and perspectives with dexterity. Alzayat may be the first person to realize that our history is our own black mirror.” —Jacob Hoefer, Labyrinth Books (Princeton, NJ)

«The condition of Whiteout Conditions is the North American sublime, a grim, gnomic, hilarious dialect Tariq Shah inherits from Denis Johnson, Don DeLillo, the Coen Brothers, The Jesus Lizard, and Colson Whitehead. —Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine and White FlightsAnt is back in Chicago for a funeral, and he typically enjoys funerals. Since most of his family has passed away, he finds himself attracted to their endearing qualities: the hyperbolic language, the stoner altar boy, seeing friends in suits for the first time. That is, until the tragic death of Ray — Ant’s childhood friend, Vince's teenage cousin. Ray was the younger third-wheel that Ant and Vince were stuck babysitting while in high school, and his sudden death makes national news.In the depths of a brutal Midwest winter, Ant rides with Vince through the falling snow to Ray’s funeral, an event that has been accruing a sense of consequence. With a poet’s sensibility, Shah navigates the murky responsibilities of adulthood, grief, toxic masculinity, and the tragedy of revenge in this haunting Midwestern noir.

«A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song.» —The GuardianAs Communism begins to crumble in Prague in the 1980s, Jana’s unremarkable life becomes all at once remarkable when a precocious young girl named Zorka moves into the apartment building with her mother and sick father. With Zorka's signature two-finger salute and abrasive wit, she brings flair to the girls’ days despite her mother’s protestations to not “be weird.” But after scorching her mother’s prized fur coat and stealing from a nefarious teacher, Zorka suddenly disappears.Meanwhile in Paris, Aimée de Saint-Pé married young to an older woman, Dominique, an actress whose star has crested and is in decline. A quixotic journey of self-discovery, Virtuoso follows Zorka as she comes of age in Prague, Wisconsin, and then Boston, amidst a backdrop of clothing logos, MTV, computer coders, and other outcast youth. But it isn’t till a Parisian conference hall brimming with orthopedic mattresses and therapeutic appendages when Jana first encounters Aimée, their fates steering them both to a cryptic bar on the Rue de Prague, and, perhaps, to Zorka.With a distinctive prose flair and spellbinding vision, Virtuoso is a story of love, loss, and self-discovery that heralds Yelena Moskovich as a brilliant and one-of-a-kind visionary.

THE OFFICIAL NORTH AMERICAN EDITIONAfter moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought — to nest, to find home — after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself.Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world — or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?

«Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything.” —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist“I loved every page of this gorgeous, grotesque, heartbreaking novel.” —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other PartiesA surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday — school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents — with the surreal — rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats — Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.

“Masande Ntshanga is a wildly talented writer. Get in on his brilliance now so you can claim you always knew he'd be great.” —Victor LaValle, author of The ChangelingTriangulum is an ambitious, often philosophical and genre-bending novel that covers a period of over 40 years in South Africa’s recent past and near future—starting from the collapse of the apartheid homeland system in the early 1990s, to the economic corrosion of the 2010s, and on to the looming, large-scale ecological disasters of the 2040s.In 2040, the South African National Space Agency receives a mysterious package containing a memoir and a set of digital recordings from an unnamed woman who claims the world will end in ten years. Assigned to the case, Dr. Naomi Buthelezi, a retired professor and science-fiction writer, is hired to investigate the veracity of the materials, and whether or not the woman's claim to have heard from a “force more powerful than humankind” is genuine.Thus begins TRIANGULUM, a found manuscript composed of the mysterious woman’s memoir and her recordings. Haunted by visions of a mysterious machine, the narrator is a seemingly adrift 17-year-old girl, whose sick father never recovered from the shock of losing his wife. She struggles to navigate school, sexual experimentation, and friendship across racial barriers in post-apartheid South Africa.When three girls go missing from their town, on her mother's birthday, the narrator is convinced that it has something to do with “the machine” and how her mother also went missing in the '90s. Along with her friends, Litha and Part, she discovers a puzzling book on UFOs at the library, the references and similarities in which lead the friends to believe that the text holds clues to the narrators’s mother's abduction. Drawing upon suggestions in the text, she and her friends set out on an epic journey that takes them from their small town to an underground lab, a criminal network, and finally, a mysterious, dense forest, in search of clues as to what happened to the narrator's mother.With extraordinary aplomb and breathtaking prose, Ntshanga has crafted an inventive and marvelous artistic accomplishment.

Sometimes running away is the bravest option. Or, so believes Rosa, who ditches her husband and home and takes off on the road. Along the way, she encounters the owner of a puppet theater who’s on a mission to conquer the world with his performance of “The Snow Queen.”Which character from this old fairy tale will Rosa identify with? With Gerda, searching fruitlessly for her lost love? With Kai, who flees home and his beloved one day without a word? Or with the Snow Queen, who seems to stand aloof above it all?With magnetic, sparkling prose, Beňová delivers a lively mosaic that ruminates on human relationships, our greatest fears and desires.

“Kriseman’s is a new voice to celebrate.”—Publishers WeeklyThe Blurry Years is a powerful and unorthodox coming-of-age story from an assured new literary voice, featuring a stirringly twisted mother-daughter relationship, set against the sleazy, vividly-drawn backdrop of late-seventies and early-eighties Florida.Callie—who ages from six to eighteen over the course of the book—leads a scattered childhood, moving from cars to strangers’ houses to the sand-dusted apartments of the tourist towns that litter the Florida coastline.Callie’s is a story about what it’s like to grow up too fast and absorb too much, to watch adults behaving badly; what it’s like to be simultaneously in thrall to and terrified of the mother who is the only family you've ever known, who moves you from town to town to leave her own mistakes behind.With precision and poetry, Kriseman's moving tale of a young girl struggling to find her way in the world is potent, and, ultimately, triumphant.

*Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018–19*Named one of the Best Books of the Year —BookforumSynopsisWith 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.

* A Best Book of 2017 —Writer's Bone“[A] mysterious work of metafiction… dizzying, arresting and defiantly bold.”—Chicago TribuneAmrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling “City of Dreams.” Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.Here—for the first time—is the complete archival manuscript of the mysterious recordings accompanied by Singh's analysis.

Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.A dazzling and strong contemporary female voice.For fans of Jenny Offill, Sarah Gerard, Clarice Lispector, and Renata Adler.Benová's original Slovak work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Arabic, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian, and Macedonian.Benová's English-language debut.

“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.”—ElleNow 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.

“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“I very much enjoyed this weird, disturbing, sometimes effed-up novel about strange films, lost films, and the fragile faith in the difference between our fictions and our realities.”—Jeff VanderMeer, Electric Literature«Kafka directed by David Lynch doesn’t even come close. It is the most hauntingly original book I’ve read in a very long time. Nicholas Rombes' The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is a strong contender for novel of the year.”—3:AM Magazine“Excellent and nightmarish… Rombes’s novel is a love letter to this art of misremembering: these “destroyed films” become as real as any film playing in a theater near you.”—Paris Review Daily«Like a cross between Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee's Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films—like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all. With Rombes, Two Dollar Radio deftly demonstrates why it is rapidly becoming the go-to press for innovative fiction.”—Brian Evenson«This hallucinatory and terrifying secret history of film is so meticulously researched and gorgeously written that I wonder if, in fact, Nicholas Rombes has uncovered a lost trove of works by David Lynch, Orson Welles, Antonioni and Jodorowsky somewhere in the California desert. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is post-modern noir at its best: beautiful and nightmarish by turns. I read it late into the night and couldn't put it down.”—Elizabeth Hand“Suffused with the best elements and obscure conspiracies of Bolaño, Ligotti and speculative fiction, Rombes' work gnaws away at the limits of what a novel looks like. Through the writing of films that never existed, it finds a space at once eerily familiar and entirely of its own.”—Evan Calder WilliamsIn 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.Nicholas Rombes teaches in Detroit, Michigan. He is author of Ramones from the 33 1/3 series and the book 10/40/70. His writing has appeared in the Believer, Filmmaker Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and the Rumpus.