BUGGING OUT W/ DANIEL RHODES
Daniel's the artist who designed Kim Gek Lin Short's wraparound cover for The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits. His work is so bloody great, we can't wait until the book's Spring release--so we're excerpting some images for the TSky website. & Keep on the lookout for other cover art making sneaky-preview appearances on the site.
NEW STAFF @ TARPAULIN SKY PRESS
The bad news: we're no longer hiring. The good news: we're delighted to welcome new editors and staff to the TSky crew. While we're at it, we'd also like to thank the good folk that have been here a long time, some from the beginning.
Big props to all, then: Advising Editors Rebecca Brown, Elena Georgiou, Bhanu Kapil, and Selah Saterstrom; Publisher Christian Peet; Editor in Chief Colie Collen; Editors Laynie Brown, Blake Butler, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Karla Kelsey, and Joanna Howard; Managing Editor Dianthe Harris; Associate Editors Duncan B. Barlow and Christine Wertheim; Production Editors Cristiana Baik, E. B. Goodale, Annie Guthrie, Kristen Nelson, and Stephen Shoup; Assistant Editors Brian Mihok, Jamey Dunham, and Michael Tod Edgerton; Reviews Editors Ross Brighton and Jared Schickling; Events Coordinator Michelle Puckett; Asst. Managing Editor Amanda Skubal; Line Editor J.A. Tyler; Copy Editor Caroline Ashby; Liaisons Sarah Brown, Jac Jemc, Deanne Lundin, and Brian Rogers; Events Assistant Megan DiBello; Production Assistants Ginger Knowlton, Josh Neely, Joseph Mains, and Joanna Pelletier; Editorial Assistants Erinn Mann, Eireene Nealand, Nathaniel Otting, Janna Plant, Mark Rockswold, Julianna Spallholz, Julie Strand, and Amish Trivedi.
FOR THE PATIENT FOLK WONDERING WHADDUP W/MY CHAP MSS?
Notifications are already being being mailed. We're running behind (shocking!) but hope to finalize all decisions within the next week or two.
NEW INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW ZORNOZA
TSky Press author Andrew Zornoza is interviewed by Molly Gaudry at Keyhole Magazine: includes "out-takes" from Where I Stay, a craving for negative reviews, good advice for homeless people in verdant pastures, a childhood pic, review copies for Eddie Vedder, and heaps of the refreshingly humble genius we've come to expect from Mr. Z.An excerpt:
MG: Are you an experimental writer? What do you think about the possible overuse of the term "innovative"?Click here to read the entire interview
AZ: I like the word innovative. I don't like the word experimental. To me, the word conjures up failure and the white humped backs of balding scientists. All writing is experimental if you insist on having a reader. Even Judy Blume. But I'm not experimenting. I'm not trying anything new. New has nothing to do with it. I'm just putting the words the way I want to hear them. You may be experimenting by reading it, but me, I'm just trying to make it feel right.
NEW REVIEW OF BIG AMERICAN TRIP AT VERSE MAGAZINEBrittany Taylor reviews TSky publisher Christian Peet's Big American Trip, at Verse magazine.
An excerpt:
As we follow the lone wanderer from Blaine, WA, to Brooklyn, we are given an increasingly intimate view of his private frustration with a society that wipes out all that has come before and simultaneously acknowledges its ravaged past with cheerful sound bites. The captions that crown many of the postcards are not-quite-prosaic bits of encyclopedic arcana that offer insight into the matter-of-fact manner in which Americans have treated their predecessors. With these tidbits, Big American Trip seeks to recall America’s erased history, deridable and otherwise. . . . The postcards are at once addressed to no one and everyone; it does not matter who reads them, but everyone will. Buckle up for Christian Peet’s worthwhile Big American Trip.
Please click here to read the whole review.
NEW REVIEWS AT TARPAULIN SKY
James Belflower’s Commuter (Instance Press, 2009), reviewed by Joel P. Sodano Jr.Commuter plays host to a constellation of motifs (international tourism, industrialization, photography, memory, identity) in addition to its main thematic focus—the juxtaposition of marriage and childbirth with the trauma of experiencing terrorist violence. In short, Commuter invites the reader on an aesthetic journey that tests the concept of relation through its positioning of various fragmentary manifestations of event, memory, emotion. This is illustrated at the book’s outset by a metro map that forms a multi-nodal system of simultaneous connection and separation. Thus, reading Commuter results in an experience greater than the sum of its parts, wherein one discovers unpredictable connections between various points of entry and departure. [Click here for the full review.]
Richard Froude's The History of Zero (Candle-Aria Press, 2008), reviewed by Sarah Suzor.
Zero questions the relationship between “fictions” (poetry, prose, literature) and “facts” (history, definition), and where in both fiction and fact language fails in conveying anything of absolute truth. . . . Zero is meant to be read and re-read multiple times, and Froude knows this, for it is our desire, as audience, to “make sense of something” that Froude is manipulating. [Click here for the full review.]
FENCEis up to its usual jaw-dropping amounts of goodness, not the least of which is a book that must be seen to be believed: Brandon Downing's text-image opus Lake Antiquity, wherein kitsch acquires gravity, becomes pathos, becomes a reckoning with the fairly unbelievable images and text that we'd sooner forget that we "own" in more ways than one. If you've seen [WARNING: seizure-alert at following link:] Dark Brandon, then this book might explain it to you. If you haven't seen Dark Brandon, then you should buy that as well. Says the promo for Lake Antiquity: "Brandon Downing has been scouring refuse piles and skimming the creme/scum off the top of two centuries of cultural production for these chiming elements. His paste-ups are cut-ups; his cut-ups are pasted with a discrimination that shares a border with insurgency." Yes. That, and a butt-nekked gnome.
Do yourself a favor and check out FB's holiday deals on Lake Antiquity, as well as Catherine Wagner's My New Job, Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton, Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foreign Secretary.
Think how great you'll feel when you already own those books, and then show up at the 4-author book release party on Dec. 12th.
RECENTLY RECEIVED AT TSKY PRESS
Most of the titles below are available for review, though we include the friend copies and the purchased copies as well, thinking we can probably scare up another copy if you're interested in reviewing one for TSky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or are otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.
Oana Avasilichioaei, Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009)
* Jack Boettcher, The Deviants (Airforce Joyride, 2009)
Rob Budde, Declining America (BookThug, 2009)
Angela Carr, The Rose Concordance (BookThug, 2009)
Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities (Counterpath Press, 2009)
* Emily Kendal Frey, Mark Leidner, and Zachary Schomburg, Coincide Series #5 (Brave Men Press, 209)
Katrine Marie Guldager, Copenhagen (P.K. Brask, translator, BookThug, 2009)
* David Highsmith, congregations (Plan B Press, 2009)
* David Highsmith, Petroglyph (Painted Bison Press, 2009)
David Highsmith, your wilderness & mine (BlazeVox Books, 2009)
Christine Hume, Shot (Counterpath Press, 2009)
Matt Jasper, Moth Moon (BlazeVox Books, 2009)
* Scott Alexander Jones, One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here (Bedouin Books, 2009)
Garrett Kalleberg, Malilenas (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)
Diane Klammer, Shooting the Moon (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009)
Karyna McGlynn, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books, 2009)
* Christina Pacosz, Notes from the Red Zone (Seven Kitchens Press [Rebound Series], 2009)
Stephen Ratcliffe, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath Press, 2009)
Joanna Ruocco, The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009)
* 6 x 6 #19 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)
* Claudia Smith, Put Your Head in My Lap (Future Tense Books, 2009)
Jane Sprague, The Port of Los Angeles (Chax Press, 2009)
Nancy Stohlman, Searching for Suzi (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009)
* Michael Stewart, A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic (The Cupboard, 2009)
* Michael Stewart, Almost Perfect Forms (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)
* Janaka Stucky, Your Name Is the Only Freedom (Brave Men Press, 2009)
Spring Ulmer, The Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay Press, 2009)
