Fiction Archives • Tarpaulin Sky Press

Hunting Season

Julia Brennan’s debut novel, Hunting Season, is part auto-fiction, part lyric essay, part lament, part film journal, part performance, and part exorcism. Challenging traditional victim/perpetrator narratives, Hunting Season is an intimate investigation into the ways we learn to love and wound. “A kind of fortress: elaborately constructed, designed to protect and to withstand the dangers that are everywhere around us. An imaginative, frightening and heartbreaking tour de force.” (Carole Maso) “You never know when her rifle will go off, leaving you bruised, cut in halves or quarters, or heartbroken. Hunting Season is ‘a slow amputation’ of love, film, disaster, agony, tamed or nonchalant sadomasochism and sexual fantasies.... Come here and let her destroy you. Tenderly.” (Vi Khi Nao)

Steven Dunn: water & power

A Small Press Distribution Fiction Bestseller

Navy veteran Steven Dunn’s second novel plunges into military culture and engages with perceptions of heroism and terrorism. water & power is a collage of voices, documents, and critical explorations that disrupt the usual frequency channels of military narratives. "Dunn’s remarkable talent for storytelling collapses the boundaries between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction." (Nikki Wallschlaeger) Dunn unrelentingly captures the difficult, funny, abject, exhilarating, heartbreaking and maddening aspects of Navy life, both on and off duty. Read this book and understand the veterans in your life better ... complex and bold and conflicted and powerful and terrified and tough and human." (Khadijah Queen)

Rebecca Brown: Not Heaven, Somewhere Else

Rebecca Brown’s thirteenth book is narrative cycle that revamps old fairy tales, movies, and myths, as it leads us from where we are to where we might go. Praise for Not Heaven, Somewhere Else: "It feels dangerous and exciting, like if (Brown) puts her big brain to it long enough, she could completely rewrite the story of who we are." (Seattle Review of Books) "Highly recommended and highly rewarding." (The Stranger) Praise for Rebecca Brown: "Strange and wonderful...Brown strips language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need." (The New York Times) "Simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around." (Dorothy Allison) "America's only real rock ‘n’ roll schoolteacher." (Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth)

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: 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).

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: 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)

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)