Novels & Fiction Collections | Tarpaulin Sky Press

Tarpaulin Sky Press
Novels & Fiction Collections

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 from our distributors or order directly from TS here.

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 from our distributors or order directly from TS here.

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)

Danielle Dutton: Attempts at a Life

Danielle Dutton's debut short-fiction collection, Attempts at a Life, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Danielle Dutton writes with a deft explosiveness that craters the page with stunning, unsettling precision" (LAIRD HUNT); "Danielle Dutton executes expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops streaking the windows of the last un-gentrified house in an old Victorian neighborhood.... An important new literary voice" (RAIN TAXI); "It’s serious, but as many dramatists celebrate: comedy orbits a dark sun. Which is to say, this is also a very funny book" (AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW)

Jenny Boully: [one love affair]*

Jenny Boully's one love affair (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006) meditates on mud daubers, Duras, and the deaths of mentally ill and drug-addicted lovers, blurring fiction, essay, and memoir in an extended prose poem that is as much a study of how we read as it is a treatise on the language of love affairs: a language of hidden messages, coded words, cryptic gestures, and suspicion: "I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a way into the “trans-genre” of prose poetry." (OPEN LETTERS MONTHLY); "Boully’s sentences are a joy in and of themselves" (RATTLE); "A genre-bending back-pocket book.... Gritty and intellectual ... addictive and soothing ... fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf.... You’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time." (COLDFRONT)

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