Authors & Books • Tarpaulin Sky Press

Authors & Books | Tarpaulin Sky Press

TRANS-GENRE TEXTS. INNOVATIVE FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY | SINCE 2003

Tarpaulin Sky Press
Authors & Books

TRANS-GENRE TEXTS. INNOVATIVE FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY | SINCE 2003

Order directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and enjoy free shipping in the U.S. as well as better prices than are offered by a certain nightmarish company whose name we shan’t utter.

Bookstores, libraries, and organizations may order here.

Order directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and enjoy free shipping in the U.S. as well as better prices than are offered by a certain nightmarish company whose name we shan’t utter.

Bookstores, libraries, and organizations may order here.

Johannes Göransson: The Sugar Book

“Doubling down on his trademark misanthropic imagery amid a pageantry of the unpleasant” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY); “Göransson is certainly of the Left, but his work is as savagely anti-idealist as Burroughs or Guyotat or Ballard.” (ENTROPY MAGAZINE); “Language smeared with bodily fluid and sex, language spackled with violence and death ... inhabiting that glittering/grotesque duality of Kardashian Family and Manson Family” (AMERICAN MICROREVIEWS).

Aaron Apps

Aaron Apps is the author of Intersex (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2015) and Dear Herculine, winner of the 2014 Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press. He is currently a doctoral student in English Literature at Brown University where he studies poetry and poetics, sexual somatechnics, animacy, hybrid forms, and the history of intersex literature. His writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Pleiades, LIT, Washington Square Review, Puerto del Sol, Columbia Poetry Review, and Blackbird.

Aaron Apps, Intersex: A Memoir

Intersex explores gender as it forms in concrete and unavoidable patterns in the material world. In this hybrid-genre memoir, intersexed author Aaron Apps adopts and upends historical descriptors of hermaphroditic bodies such as “freak of nature,” “hybrid,” “imposter,” “sexual pervert,” and “unfortunate monstrosity” in order to trace his own monstrous sex as it perversely intertwines with gender expectations and medical discourse. "Intersex is all feral prominence.... Necessarily vulnerable, brave and excessive.... Like the best kind of memoir ... a book that bursts from its very frame" (BHANU KAPIL)

Claire Donato

Claire Donato is the author of the novel, Burial, from Tarpaulin Sky Press, and the poetry chapbook, Someone Else’s Body, from Cannibal Books. Her fiction, poetry, and lyric essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Boston Review, Encyclopedia, Evening Will Come, LIT, Octopus, and 1913: a journal of forms. She grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Claire Donato: Burial

Set in the mind of a narrator who is grieving the loss of her father, who conflates her motel room with the morgue, and who encounters characters that may not exist, Claire Donato's Burial is a little novel about an immeasurable black hole. "dark, multivalent, genre-bending ... unrelenting, grotesque beauty" (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "BEST SUMMER READS") "Unforgettable" (HEATHER CHRISTLE); "Precise urn-like prose ... with the poise of Woolf or Loy or Carson" (BLAKE BUTLER); "shimmers with pain and delight" (BRIAN EVENSON); "Donato's assured and poetic debut augurs a promising career" (BENJAMIN MOSER).

Joyelle McSweeney

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of two titles with Tarpaulin Sky Press: Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007) and Salamandrine: 8 Gothics (forthcoming, April 2013). She also author of four titles from Fence Books: Percussion Grenade, Flet, The Red Bird, and The Commandrine and Other Poems.

Joyelle McSweeney: Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

A collection of short stories by Joyelle McSweeney, refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood; making impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects. "McSweeney’s breakneck prose harnesses the throbbing pulse of language itself." (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY); "sexy teleological apocrypha of motherhood literature, a siren song for those mothers 'with no soul to photograph'" (BROOKLYN RAIL); "These words ring and richochet like tinnitus in your ears" (QUARTERLY WEST); "One would not make love to a Salamandrine during a sandstorm" (ALEISTER CROWLEY)

david wolach

david wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and has been an active participant in Nonsite Collective. wolach is the author of Hospitalogy, from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010), Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009).

david wolach: Hospitalogy

"An extraordinary work that takes us into the complex guts of the 'hospital-hotel complex.' Here the body rebels, redacts, pulls, and sings between patient and patient. wolach performs a radical somatics, procedural anatomic work, queer narrativity.'" (ERICA KAUFMAN); "The strange tearing apart held inside that holds you inside, singing static and shrapnel.... Dear 'jesus of the pain.' Welcome to david wolach’s beautiful corrosion." (FRED MOTEN); "holds the space of the clinic we don’t yet have, the dark we need, the chronic we might dream rather than undergo." (ELENI STECOPOULOS); "documents the soft rebellion of staying alive, articulating the transition from invisibility to indecipherability." (FRANK SHERLOCK)

Johannes Göransson: Haute Surveillance

"[A] feverish and explicit set of images and ideas revolving around power, fetish, porn, media, violence, translation, punishment, performance, and aesthetics..... kind of like a novelization of a movie about the production of a play based on Abu Ghraib, though with way more starlets and cocaine and semen." (BLAKE BUTLER, VICE); "part epic poem, part science fiction, part pornographic film, and all literature" (JOHN YAU, HYPERALLERGIC); "so filled with invention and wit and ferocity that I was compelled to read it, at times against my will, mesmerized, enthralled. (CAROLE MASO)

Kim Gek Lin Short

Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of two lyric novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press, China Cowboy and The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, in addition to the the cross-genre chapbooks The Residents (dancing girl press) and Run (Rope-a-Dope), a 2010 Golden Gloves winner.

Kim Gek Lin Short: China Cowboy

Set in a technicolor timewarp called Hell, Hong Kong, Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy follows wannabe cowgirl La La, who is hellbent on realizing her dream to be a folk-singing sensation even as she tries to survive her kidnapper, Ren, who is just hellbent. Ren thinks he’ll win, but La La, dead or alive, always wins. "both devastating and uncomfortably enjoyable" (AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW); "a satanically intricate narrative with seemingly infinite vantage points in space, time and sympathy … a zone where elegance and grace can gambol with the just-plain-fucked-up" (HTML GIANT), “leaves one’s nerves exposed and moral fortitude shaken" (FACT-SIMILE). “Excruciatingly compelling, so infernal...in languages variously pornographic and desperately, radically tender…. A bold, imaginative, timely work from a courageous and complex thinker" (HEIDI LYNN STAPLES) "Grossly disturbing and excruciatingly seductive... Tales of fierce femme survival.... (JAI ARUN RAVINE)

Jenny Boully

Jenny Boully is the author of two Tarpaulin Sky titles, [one love affair] and not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, as well as The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, first published by Slope Editions).

Jenny Boully: not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

In not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, Jenny Boully presents us with a “deliciously creepy” swan song from Wendy Darling to Peter Pan. As in her previous book [one love affair]*, Boully reads between the lines of a text—in this case J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy—and emerges with the darker underside, with those sinister or subversive places merely echoed or hinted at. "[T]o delve into Boully's work is to dive with faith from the plank -- to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself." (BOOKSLUT) "Simultaneously metaphysical and visceral, these addresses from Wendy to Peter in lyric prose are scary, sexual, and intellectually disarming." (HUFFINGTON POST); "Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way." (ANDER MONSON)

Elizabeth Hall: I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris

Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Bisexual Nonfiction
Small Press Distribution Bestseller

Elizabeth Hall set out to find all that had been written about the clit past and present. As she soon discovered, the history of the clitoris is no ordinary tale; rather, its history is marked by the act of forgetting. “Marvelously researched and sculpted…. Bulleted points rat-tat-tatting the patriarchy, strobing with pleasure” (Dodie Bellamy). “Freud, terra cotta cunts, hyenas, anatomists, and Acker, mixed with a certain slant of light on a windowsill and a leg thrown open invite us… Bawdy and beautiful” (Wendy C. Ortiz). “Gorgeous little book about a gorgeous little organ….” (Janet Sarbanes). “An orgy of information…. At once sexy and scientifically compelling.” (The Rumpus)

Amy King

Amy King is the author of the poetry collection, The Missing Museum, co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. King also joins the ranks of Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt & Rachel Carson as the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association Award. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is currently co-editing the anthologies Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change and Bettering American Poetry 2015.

Amy King: The Missing Museum

Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize
A Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller

"Sometimes the thrill of reading poetry is the sense one minute that you understand the poet so clearly you’re not just seeing through her eyes but, perhaps more importantly, breathing through her lungs. (Lambda Literary) A visceral stunner … and an instruction manual…. King’s archival work testifies to the power—however obscured by the daily noise of our historical moment—of art, of the possibility for artists to legislate the world. (Kenyon Review)

Kim Parko

Kim Parko is the author of Cure All (Caketrain Press, 2010) and the novel The Grotesque Child, co-winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She lives with her husband, daughter, and the seen and unseen, in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she is an associate professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Kim Parko: The Grotesque Child

Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award

The Grotesque Child is a story about being and being and being something else. It is about swallowing and regurgitating, conceiving and birthing. It is about orifices and orbs. It is about the viscous, weepy, goopy, mucousy, bloody state of feminine being and trans-being. It is about pain and various healers and torturers, soothers and inflictors. It is about what sleeps and hides in all the nooks and crannies of perceived existence and existence unperceived.

Dana Green

Dana Green is the author of Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing, co-winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. She lives and writes somewhere outside of Denver with her almost husband and cat.

Dana Green: Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing

Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award

Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing explores how storytelling changes with each iteration, each explosion, each mutation. Told through multiple versions, these are stories of weapons testing, sheep that can herd themselves into watercolors, and a pregnant woman whose water breaks every day for nine months. “I love Dana Green’s wild mind” (Noy Holland). “A tour de force of deeply destabilizing investigation into language and self” (Laird Hunt). “Dana Green’s bracing debut .. reminds us every ordinary moment, every ordinary sentence, is an impending emergency” (Lance Olsen).

Steven Dunn: Potted Meat

Finalist, Colorado Book Award
Co-winner, Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards
A Small Press Distribution Bestseller

"101 pages of miniature texts that keep tapping the nails in, over and over, while speaking as clearly and directly as you could ask…. Zero indulgence, all formative. Bone Thugs, underage drinking, alienation, death, love, Bob Ross, dreams of blood: This thin thing is flooded with power." (Blake Butler, VICE) "This book needs to be read." (Laird Hunt) "A remarkable piece of work. Rarely does one encounter a book so evocative of place and so bracing in its ability to transform the quotidian into revelation." (Kevin Powers) "I feel grateful to be alive during the time in which he writes books (Selah Saterstrom).