TS Press Books | Tarpaulin Sky Press

Novels & Novellas, TS Authors-Books Mix, X no blog, X no feed

Steven Dunn: Potted Meat

A novel set in a decaying town in southern West Virginia, Potted Meat follows a young boy into adolescence as he struggles with abusive parents, poverty, alcohol addiction, and racial tensions. Using fragments as a narrative mode to highlight the terror of ellipses, Potted Meat explores the fear, power, and vulnerability of storytelling. “Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat is full of wonder and silence and beauty and strangeness and ugliness and sadness and truth and hope…. This book needs to be read” (LAIRD HUNT). “An extraordinary book. Here is an emerging voice that calls us to attention…. Like a visceral intervention across the surface of language, simultaneously cutting to its depths, to change the world” (SELAH SATERSTROM).

Short Fiction, TS Authors-Books Mix, X no blog, X no feed

Dana Green: Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing

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).

Memoir, Nonfiction, TS Authors-Books Mix, X no blog, X no feed

Elizabeth Hall: I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris

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… Mines discourses as varied as sexology, plastic surgery, literature and feminism to produce an eye-opening compendium…. The ‘tender button’ finally gets its due” (JANET SARBANES). “God this book is glorious…. You will learn and laugh and wonder why it took you so long to find this book” (SUZANNE SCANLON).

Poetry, TS Authors-Books Mix, X no blog, X no feed

Amy King: The Missing Museum

Nothing that is complicated may ever be simplified, but rather catalogued, cherished, exposed. Amy King’s The Missing Museum spans art, physics & the spiritual, including poems that converse with the sublime and ethereal. The poems act through ekphrasis, apostrophe & alchemical conjuring. They amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as matter is beaten into text. Here is a kind of directory of the world as it rushes into extinction, in order to preserve and transform it at once.

Novels & Novellas, TS Authors-Books Mix, X no blog, X no feed

Kim Parko: The Grotesque Child

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.

Poetry, TS Authors-Books Mix, TS Press Books, X no blog

Johannes Goransson: 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.” (JAMES PATE, ENTROPY MAGAZINE); “Language smeared with bodily fluid and sex, language spackled with violence and death…. It takes the reader far beyond their comfort zone, as poetry should. Just like Los Angeles herself, the poems inhabit that glittering/grotesque duality of Kardashian Family and Manson Family” (CARLEEN TIBBETTS, AMERICAN MICROREVIEWS & INTERVIEWS); “I’m not sure that even Rimbaud would title a poem ‘My Sperm Gets in the Flowers’” (JOHNNY PAYNE, CLEAVER MAGAZINE).

Memoir, Nonfiction, Trans-genre, TS Authors-Books Mix, TS Press Books, X no blog

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)

Fiction, Novels & Novellas, TS Authors-Books Mix, TS Press Books

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).

Fiction, Short Fiction, Trans-genre, TS Authors-Books Mix, TS Mag: Occult, TS Press Books

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)