Nonfiction Titles | Tarpaulin Sky Press
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Aaron Apps | Jenny Boully | Ana Bozicevic | Julia Brennan | Rebecca Brown | Jennifer S. Cheng | Traci O. Connor | Olivia Cronk | Mark Cunningham | Piper J. Daniels | Claire Donato | Steven Dunn | Danielle Dutton | Sandy Florian | Sarah Goldstein | Johannes Göransson | Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson | Dana Green | Elizabeth Hall | James Haug | Claire Hero | Amy King | Paul Koneazny | Gordon Massman | Paul McCormick | Joyelle McSweeney | Teresa K. Miller | Jeanne Morel | Mariko Nagai | Kim Parko | Andrew Michael Roberts | Joanna Ruocco | Lauren Russell | Brandon Shimoda | Kim Gek Lin Short | Chad Sweeney | Shelly Taylor | GC Waldrep | Max Winter | david wolach | Andrew Zornoza
Order directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and enjoy free shipping in the U.S. as well as better prices than those 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.
Body of Empire
Co-winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award
Nonfiction, 272 pages, paperback. September 2022
Weaving historical documents, photographs, and first-hand accounts against a background of nationalism and war, Body of Empire explores the lives of Japanese sex workers – both government-sanctioned and freelance – between 1868 and 1953. "An astonishing act of counter-erasure" (Brandon Shimoda); "Extraordinary" (Cassandra Atherton); "Haunted and inspired" (Janice Lee); "Harrowing, essential work" (David Naimon)
Descent
Winner: 2021 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize
Poetry Bestseller: Small Press Distribution.
In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. “A search for truths felt in one’s bones.” (Brenda Coultas) "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering.... Russell speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.” (Douglas Kearney) “Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell’s poems are as much ascent—into a present shaped by the past—as descent from America’s true heroic figures.” (John Keene)
Poetry Against All
"This slim journal contains multitudes. It’s a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it’s an urgent manifesto. Göransson concludes: "This is written without hope." But paradoxically, Poetry Against All offers just that." (Jeff Jackson) "Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson's Poetry Against All -- for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers -- concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one’s children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself." (Ken Chen)
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)
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)
Body of Empire
Co-winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award
Nonfiction, 272 pages, paperback. September 2022
Weaving historical documents, photographs, and first-hand accounts against a background of nationalism and war, Body of Empire explores the lives of Japanese sex workers – both government-sanctioned and freelance – between 1868 and 1953. "An astonishing act of counter-erasure" (Brandon Shimoda); "Extraordinary" (Cassandra Atherton); "Haunted and inspired" (Janice Lee); "Harrowing, essential work" (David Naimon)
Descent
Winner: 2021 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize
Poetry Bestseller: Small Press Distribution.
In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. “A search for truths felt in one’s bones.” (Brenda Coultas) "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering.... Russell speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.” (Douglas Kearney) “Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell’s poems are as much ascent—into a present shaped by the past—as descent from America’s true heroic figures.” (John Keene)
Poetry Against All
"This slim journal contains multitudes. It’s a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it’s an urgent manifesto. Göransson concludes: "This is written without hope." But paradoxically, Poetry Against All offers just that." (Jeff Jackson) "Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson's Poetry Against All -- for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers -- concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one’s children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself." (Ken Chen)
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)