News | Tarpaulin Sky Press

TS AUTHORS AND THE TROUBLE THEY CAUSE

News | Tarpaulin Sky Press

TS AUTHORS AND THE TROUBLE THEY CAUSE

Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine reviewed at Quarterly West

"In Joyelle McSweeney’s story collection Salamandrine: 8 Gothics, language commits incest with itself.... Sounds repeat, replicate, and mutate in her sentences, monstrous sentences of aural inbreeding and consangeous consonants, strung out and spinning like the dirtiest double-helix, dizzy with disease...."

Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy reviewed in the American Book Review

"Through the figure of La La, a tragic (child) victim/heroine not unlike the stars La La idolizes, Kim Gek Lin Short explores questions of agency and exploitation—emphasis on exploitation. Short is an elegant, entrancing writer, and her second book-length collection is both devastating and uncomfortably enjoyable."

Claire Donato's Burial receives starred review at Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly gives a starred review to Claire Donato's debut novella, Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2013) "Donato has composed with unrelenting, grotesque beauty an exhaustive recursive obsession about the unburiability of the dead, and the incomprehensibility of death."

Blake Butler at VICE reviews, excerpts Johannes Göransson’s Haute Surveillance

Johannes Göransson's Haute Surveillance (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2013): "A feverish and explicit set of images and ideas revolving around power, fetish, porn, media, violence, translation, punishment, performance, and aesthetics. Taking its title from a Jean Genet play of the same name, it’s kind of like a novelization of a movie about the production of a play based on Abu Ghraib, though with way more starlets and cocaine and semen.... [B]eautifully startling and fucked and funny and tender and sad and putrid and glitter-covered all at once."

Johannes Göransson’s Haute Surveillance and Uche Nduka’s Ijele reviewed by Stacy Hardy

Writes Hardy: "The narrative of [Göransson's Haute Surveillance] is itinerant, slippery. It unwinds, confused by voices, rhythms, and accents, 'interlingual puns', 'auto-translations' and 'automutilations' that befuddle the desire for a secure semantics. It is at once a prose poem, a 'novel dedicated to the homos and the awkward perfumists', a biography of its author, an 'autobiography of a foreigner', 'a fashion show dedicated to a riot', a film script and a theoretical text.... 'This is the first lesson in haute surveillance: Always write like you’re a teenage virgin. Always reach for the gun.'"

Laura Carter reviews Johannes Göransson's Haute Surveillance at Fanzine

"Imagine that you are on a secret journey through the life of Jean Genet, through the shifting framework of a character made by Johannes Göransson," writes Carter, who imagines no small number of scenarios for readers of Haute Surveillance (TSky Press, 2013), in a review that's worth reading as a thing unto itself. "You are a teenage virgin," Carter continues, a few sentences later, "the marriage of pornography and Art, which will, in the long run (as many Woody Allen movies suggest) turn you into a Dictator."

Danielle Dutton interviewed at The Paris Review

At The Paris Review, Nicole Rudick interviews TSky Press author Danielle Dutton (Attempts at a Life) about her fabulous press, Dorothy, a publishing project, along with topics ranging from crossover readerships (you know, poets who deign read fiction, and vice versa), artist Yelena Bryksenkova, book design, and the real Aunt Dorothy....

HTML GIANT review of Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy

We'd like to believe that Sarah Heady's estimation of China Cowboy is an apt description, generally, of the work TSky Press seeks to publish--work that "has expanded and fused the poetic and narrative fields, creating a zone where elegance and grace can gambol with the just-plain-fucked-up."

Bookslut reviews Johannes Göransson's entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

At Bookslut, Lorian Long reviews Johannes Goransson's *entrance to a colonial pageant*: "Despite the tiny size of Colonial Pageant, it contains a gore so massive you will either shower or move the book to the other side of the bedroom upon opening its cover....Body parts, body styles. Genitalia as fashion, as construct, as exploit. Göransson takes Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and blasts it with skin-made dynamite. He creates such a mess of appendages, desires, and impulses that the taglines of Queer Theory or Gender Studies seem antiquated compared to the blurring of binaries to be found in this work. It is a new thing. Göransson has managed to produce a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready."

Huffington Post and Lantern Review examine, praise Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown…

Huffington Post and Lantern Review praise Jenny Boully's *not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011): "Boully has captured the darkness of Barrie's text, and in elevating its inter- and sub-textualities to the level of discourse she illuminates and reinvigorates her source material without sacrificing any of its creepiness, wonder, or violence. Simultaneously metaphysical and visceral, these addresses from Wendy to Peter in lyric prose are scary, sexual, and intellectually disarming."

Sarah Goldstein's Fables reviewed at The Iowa Review

Sarah Goldstein's *Fables* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011) is reviewed at The Iowa Review: "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 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize Winners & Finalists

We don't need to tell you that the last several months have been exceptionally brutal. Nor will we comment further, except to say it is in the context of this nationwide brutality that we read manuscripts for the 2017 TS Book Prizes.

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