Radio Cacophony

Fiction. House Shows, Couch Swaps, and Roommate Swaps. Genres, Subgenres, and Post-genres. With its confessional language and intimate tête-à-tête style, RADIO CACOPHONY pulls us into one woman's familiar-yet-singular world of social anxiety, sexuality, and musical discovery. In these short vignettes centered around a college radio station in the early aughts, Michelle Dove builds a cool and fearless interplay between individuality and community, one where eccentricity coexists with the yearning to belong. Comical, animated, and provoked, RADIO CACOPHONY is full of the imperfect encounters that make us human and buoyant revelations that we can love who we become.

"It's been a while since I've read a writer as singular, funny, and incisive as Michelle Dove. RADIO CACOPHONY manages to distill everything that is insane and wonderful about a rarefied subculture—the squad of workers presently powering your local public radio station—into muscular, hysterical sentences that feel like real marvels on the page. Misanthropy, misogyny, lonesomeness, fandom, beers, love, music, sex. The terrible clumsiness of youth. I read this book hungrily, and with such deep recognition."—Amanda Petrusich