TS Press Books Archives • Page 2 of 5 • Tarpaulin Sky Press

Piper J. Daniels: Ladies Lazarus

Co-winner of the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Awards
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction
Longlist, PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Equal parts séance, polemic, and love letter, Piper J. Daniels’ Ladies Lazarus examines evangelical upbringing, sexual trauma, queer identity, and mental illness with a raw intensity that moves between venom and grace. “Beautifully written…. Daniels emerges as an empowering and noteworthy voice.” (Publishers Weekly) “ Ladies Lazarus is the best debut I’ve read in a long time. Daniels has resurrected the personal essay and what it is and what it can do.” (Jenny Boully) “A siren song from planet woman, a love letter from the body, a resistance narrative against the dark.” (Lidia Yuknavitch)

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: 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: 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).

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, 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: 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).