Our reading period for manuscripts is now closed. Finalists and winners will be announced in Spring 2020 on this website and in our newsletter, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Our sincere thanks to everyone who sent us a manuscript. Being privy to these texts is an honor. Discovering new voices, reading new work by authors whom we already admire  —  these are the best parts of our job.

Book Reviews

are read year-round. Send your review to reviews@tarpaulinsky.com. If you have never reviewed for us before, then please send a brief cover letter and tell us where we might read other reviews that you have written. Publishers (or authors) may send review copies to Tarpaulin Sky Press, PO Box 189, Grafton, VT 05146. A full list of titles that are available for review may be found here.

Essays / Columns / Serials

Tarpaulin Sky Magazine is now accepting proposals for monthly serials and columns as well as one-off features. Living is shit and life is shit; let us fashion mudpies of said shit. Can you contaminate us and make us better? We enjoy radiation sickness, lead poisoning, mutated DNA, reliving your mother’s suicide attempts, bad taste. Collectively the TS Family of authors and editors have hundreds of years experience with trans-genre texts as well as physical and mental disabilities arising from bad genes, toxic environments, and trauma. We have been emotionally and physically abused, sexually assaulted, arrested, drugged, poisoned. One of us was abducted as a teen and later narrowly escaped being murdered on an abandoned schoolbus. We have lost numerous loved ones to addictions and diseases and sudden deaths. We have family in prison, friends who are suicides. Stories of heartbreak & reconciliation will be ignored / deleted unless they featured disabled lovers and either traditional necro-mancy/-philia or experimental forms of congress with interdimensional beings. Electroshock deprived Tarpaulin Sky’s Editor of her own heart. The Publisher is a fan of any text exploring Satanic Ritual Abuse of children. Tell us about your pock marks, your Oily Anal Leakage, your plans for The End.

Here are some topics that we would excited to read about, but we are open to other queries if they blow the tops of our heads off:

• Visions, Hallucinations, Revelations – (We can’t wait to find the next Margery Kemp)
• Trauma – (esp. intergenerational trauma)
• Chronic Pain, Mental Illness, Body Horror, Fleshy Confines 
• Ecology with a focus on pollution, contamination, global warming, and soothsaid visions of the future
• True Crime Memoir – (Jane: A Murder remains a fave. As does our own Piper J. Daniels’ Ladies Lazarus. Please, no web-sleuthing.)
• Mysteries/Occult – (Are you haunted? Have you been abducted by aliens and are now privy to multidimensional art forms? Reveal for us your daily rituals and perversions.)
• Serialized Fiction – (Nylund, for example)
• The Grotesque & The Gothic – (e.g. “Uncovering the Popular Midwestern Gothic” by Julia Madsen)
• Critical Work – (e.g. “The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine” by Hannah Williams, “Multiple Genre Disorder” by Christian Peet)
• Personal Interactions with Books/Texts/Art – (More traditional reviews are accepted at an address above. For these columns, we’d rather read pieces on your Stendhal syndrome, etc.)
• Monstrous Diaries
• Oddities – Personal
• Oddities – Historical
• Other 

Please take a look at our  magazine to better understand our cult. Direct all queries to Editor M. Forajter: mforajter@tarpaulinsky.com. If she’s interested, she will reply.

We are more heroin than speed. Thus are we eternally backlogged. Do not take our silence personally. Feel free to query if you think we missed your original email.