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.
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Aaron Apps | Jenny Boully | Ana Bozicevic | Julia Brennan | Rebecca Brown | Jennifer S. Cheng | Traci O. Connor | Olivia Cronk | Mark Cunningham | Piper J. Daniels | Claire Donato | Steven Dunn | Danielle Dutton | Sandy Florian | Sarah Goldstein | Johannes Göransson | Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson | Dana Green | Elizabeth Hall | James Haug | Claire Hero | Amy King | Paul Koneazny | Gordon Massman | Paul McCormick | Joyelle McSweeney | Teresa K. Miller | Jeanne Morel | Mariko Nagai | Kim Parko | Andrew Michael Roberts | Joanna Ruocco | Lauren Russell | Brandon Shimoda | Kim Gek Lin Short | Chad Sweeney | Shelly Taylor | GC Waldrep | Max Winter | david wolach | Andrew Zornoza
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: Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
"I don't know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all).... You'll need a machine gun and a body double.... Burroughs and Genet and 'Pac are dead. Long live Goransson" (BLAKE BUTLER); "a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready" (BOOKSLUT); "Page after page begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child ... before immolating the host, the reader" (PANK MAG); "a pile up of sequined things and fleshy things.... The audience is often implicated. After all, torture and interrogation is not borne out of individual will and action alone.... All aboard" (HTML GIANT)
Sarah Goldstein
Sarah Goldstein is the author of Fables, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. Goldstein's writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Bateau, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, New South, Verse, and other journals, and her artwork has been shown in the US and Canada.
Sarah Goldstein: Fables
Departing from the Brothers Grimm to approach our own economically and socially fractured present, Fables constructs a world defined by small betrayals, transformations, and brutality amid its animal and human inhabitants. Goldstein weaves together familiar and contemporary allegories creating a series of vibrant, and vital, tales for our time. “Goldstein’s vision and approach is wholly new. Her work in this collection is more than translation and transcription: Fables contains poems that whisper tradition but fully stand on their own.” (THE IOWA REVIEW); "Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision" (THE RUMPUS); “In the meadow of fairy tale, Goldstein unrolls ribbons of story that fly gamely and snap with brilliance.” (DEB OLIN UNFERTH)
Shelly Taylor
Shelly Taylor is the author of Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and Dirt City Lions (Horse Less Press), as well as two poetry chapbooks, Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press of Yo-Yo Labs) & Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press).
Shelly Taylor: Black-Eyed Heifer
Shelly Taylor's debut collection of poems is a "mosaic of form and language, childhood and adulthood, the American South, horses, gravel roads, and light. It is a riptide pulling its readers out into the deep, powerful currents of nostalgia. It is unrelenting" (TRIQUARTERLY); "Radically innovative use of language" (JIM HARRISON); "Language you haven’t heard before but know, right away, to be urgent.... Hell-bent, mad-cap adventures whose diction & syntax defy category." (JANE MILLER); "A mighty anthem to down home local culture ... the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land.... Abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty" (BRENDA IIJIMA)
Kim Gek Lin Short: The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits
The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is the prose elegy of a boy who wants to be a bug in order to save by symbiosis the dead girl he loves. Enacted in prose poems and cross-referenced datebooks, the inseparable lovers eternally rehearse for a real life together, repeating in that instant between being and nonbeing, the loss into which their love escaped. "beguiling and entirely enthralling" (ART + CULTURE); “An opiate trip . . . terrifying, ungraspable . . . sad and beautiful” (NEW PAGES); “Irresistible!” (NORMA COLE); “Do not read this book at night” (BHANU KAPIL); “This small unsettling book . . . both conceals and reveals its morbidity, its twisted thirsts” (JOYELLE MCSWEENEY); “Valentines . . . cut from thick, mealy-colored childhood stock. Here is language as enchantment” (SELAH SATERSTROM)
Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco is the author of Man's Companions, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press) and the novel The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press). Winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, judged by Ben Marcus, Joanna's forthcoming book from FC2 is Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith-A Diptych. Joanna co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She currently resides in Denver, Colorado.
Joanna Ruocco: Man’s Companions
Joanna Ruocco's first short-fiction collection, Man's Companions, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Find yourself warped from one world to another, transported by the flight of her words between languages" (THE NATION); "Ruocco's understated humor and irony have a playful, experimental appeal" (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY); "Early Lydia Davis seems not unfairly applicable, as does Amy Hempel" (ART + CULTURE); "Ruocco is consistently inventive. She tilts the world as we know it, challenging our senses" (TRIQUARTERLY)
Traci O. Connor
Traci O Connor is the author of Recipes for Endangered Species from Tarpaulin Sky Press (2010), and has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in journals such as Barrow Street, Fourteen Hills, Gargoyle, Margie, Mid-American Review, LIT, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.
Traci O. Connor: Recipes for Endangered Species
Traci O Connor's debut collection of short fictions, Recipes for Endangered Species (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010): "These stories constitute some tender, aching love stories. Connor's characters are curious specimens who don't quite fit in, but have rich inner lives.... Creepy, Hitchcockian..... Juxtaposes vivid descriptions of flowers with excerpts from the painter's late asylum notebooks to evoke the chilling stream-of-consciousness of a troubled narrator..... A kind of nut job's notebook, full of Lolita-like obsession (including photographs). Cocktail recipes conclude each of the stories in this varied and occasionally unnerving debut collection." (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY)
Ana Bozicevic
Ana Bozicevic is the author of Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press; a 2010 Lambda Award Finalist for Lesbian Poetry), Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC 2013) and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently War on a Lunchbreak (Belladonna*, 2011). With Željko Mitić, she is the editor of The Day Lady Gaga Died: an Anthology of NYC Poetry of the 21st Century (in Serbian, Peti talas/The Fifth Wave, 2011).
Ana Božičević: Stars of the Night Commute
Ana Božičević's debut poetry collection,
Gordon Massman
Gordon Massman is the author of The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008, from Tarpaulin Sky Press. He divides his time between Medford, MA, and the island of Frenchboro, ME. Poems from The Essential Numbers have appeared in The Numbers (Pavement Saw Press) as well as in Exquisite Corpse, The Harvard Review, The New York Quarterly, Pleiades, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere.
Gordon Massman: The Essential Numbers 1991-2008
Gordon Massman's The Essential Numbers 1991-2008, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Unyielding monoliths of spit and tongue.... Fucked and ready to fuck your head.... Where so much ‘poetry’ can be yadda, these are words saying something hard and loud, and meaning it.... This is the kind of book you can’t ask for until you have it." (BLAKE BUTLER, HTML GIANT); "Gordon Massman is the kind of writer that guts you, revolts you" (SHELLY TAYLOR); "timid people be damned" (BRANDON SHIMODA)
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)