Fiction Archives • Page 2 of 3 • Tarpaulin Sky Press

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: 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)

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: 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)

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: 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: 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)

Andrew Zornoza: Where I Stay

Andrew Zornoza's debut, Where I Stay (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009) walks the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men. A meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love, Where I Stay is a story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything: "Refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe.... Meditative and rhythmic in the mind of Mary Robison mashed with William Vollmann.... Unforgettable." (BLAKE BUTLER, HTML GIANT); "Squarely situated between the ethos of Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans" (REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION); "With a languorous but precise lyricism…. [Zornoza] is a cartographer of loneliness, doubt, and fear, one that fearlessly delineates the stark realms of disappointment, unrequited love, and unfulfilled dreams" (RAIN TAXI); "a gifted journey through borderlands between text and image" (LANCE OLSEN); "As haunting as it is gritty.... I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts" (SMALL PRESS REVIEWS); "expert" (NEWPAGES)

Joyelle McSweeney: Nylund, the Sarcographer

Acclaimed poet Joyelle McSweeney's first novel, Nylund the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) is a something like a baroque noir: "Campy-cum-lyrical post-Ashberyan prose.... Language dissolves into stream-of-consanguinity post-surrealism and then resolves into a plot again.... Recommended" (STEPHEN BURT); "Nylund is like interesting on steroids.... If you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you’d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you" (BOOKSLUT); "a masterful redefinition of what constitutes prose.... A character who is the very embodiment of writing" (NEWPAGES); "Welcome to fiction's new femme fatale, Joyelle McSweeney" (KATE BERNHEIMER)