Tarpaulin Sky Press 2010 Open Reading Period picks ...

Tarpaulin Sky Press is pleased to announce that it has selected not one but two manuscripts from the 2010 open reading period: Claire Donato’s novella, Burial, and David Wolach’s poetry collection, Hospitalogy, both of which will be published in Fall 2012. Congrats!

Claire's and David's books will join the already-scheduled publication of Joyelle McSweeney’s second book with TSky Press, a collection of short fictions entitled Salamandrine: 8 Gothics. Other forthcoming publications include Kim Gek Lin Short's second book with TSky Press, China Cowboy, coming this fall, as well as our picks from the last chapbook reading period, Claire Hero's Dollyland, and  Paula Koneazny's Installation, also coming fall/winter 2011.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who thought enough of Tarpaulin Sky Press to send their work to our open reading period. We would also like to note that the following authors and titles made this a particularly difficult reading period for us, by virtue of their being too damn good:

Rosa Alcala, The Translator's Blues
Greg Bachar, Curiosisosity
Carrie Bennett, The Land is a Painted Thing
Emma Bolden, Malificae
David Brennan, Another Gallows
Amy Sara Carroll, FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9-11 Pornography
Dereck Clemons, Arts & Leisure
Olivia Cronk, Skin Horse
John Deming, Human Heads
Sandra Doller, Memory of the Prose Machine and Man Years
Jamey Gallagher, Crumblehead
K. Lorraine Graham, Baseball Season In America
Adriana Grant, Bang, Pouf
Jenny Gropp Hess, Organographies
Steven Karl, Dear Human Race
Drew Krewer, I Could Be Your Beauty Resort
Tony Mancus, How to Build a Radio-belly
John Mann, Able, Baker, Charlie
Kristi Maxwell, PLAN/K
Susan Maxwell, Tournament
Catherine Meng, The Longest Solar Eclipse of the Century
Ben Mirov, Nightingale Forge
Monica Mody, Kala Pani
Linnea Ogden, Heart Of Palm
Caryl Pagel, Emergencies
Aimee Parkison, Water-Clock Water
Kim Parko, Junior
Jeffrey Pethybridge, Striven, The Bright Treatise
Michelle Naka Pierce, Continuous Frieze Bordering [Red]
Deborah Poe, Hélène
Michael Rerick, OdeIss/heIs
Amber Sparks, The Monstrous Sadness of Mythical Creatures
Dao Strom, we were meant to be a gentle people
JeFF Stumpo, diluvium
Dan Thomas-Glass, An ocean is a body
Genya Turovskaya, The Man Falling
Sara Veglahn, The MayfliesSharon White, On Voyage
Carolyn Zaikowski, An Invisible Bottle of White Ink
Nicole Zdeb, The Friction of Distance

Bookslut reviews Jenny Boully's *not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them*

At Bookslut, Micah McCrary reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, out this month from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

Here are two of our favorite quotes from the review.

Boully, both a poet and an essayist by experience, knows perfectly well how to weave together the intricacies of chosen words and images with an arc essential to an impacting story, and the key to her prose here lies not in its darkness or its grownup-ness, but rather its careful tiptoeing between the minds and hearts of characters whose surfaces we've known for decades....

[T]o delve into Boully's work is to dive with faith from the plank -- to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself. One must, when reading the work, “dispel every other thought,” as Calvino would say. They must find themselves in a locked room, perhaps on a couch, perhaps in the bath (to dream of mer-creatures), or perhaps almost prostrate in bed with wide and absorbing eyes. They must be willing to fly themselves....

Click here to read the full review at Bookslut

The Man Booker Prize

The prize was originally known as the Booker-McConnell Prize, after the company Booker-McConnell began sponsoring the event in 1968; it became commonly known as the "Booker Prize" or simply "the Booker." When administration of the prize was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation in 2002, the title sponsor became the investment company Man Group, which opted to retain "Booker" as part of the official title of the prize.

Hilarity on Wikipedia. That's one way of putting it. The Man Group "opted to retain" the word "Booker." You know, rather than just calling it "The Man Prize."

Julianna Spallholz's debut collection of short fictions, The State of Kansas...

cannot be published soon enough. Get a little taste here. The actual pub date is Fall 2011. This is what Christian said about it: "I'm guessing that Lydia Davis and Diane Williams fans will be the most excited, but only because no one is waiting on new Hemingway or Carver, and Spallholz is something like the love child of all four. Don’t ask me how that works, or how Spallholz does what she does, but the end result is an astonishing debut. Indeed the whole genre of short-fictions is getting a major facelift of late, thanks to a proliferation of young and youngish U.S. women writers such as Danielle Dutton, Amelia Gray, Joanna Howard, Alissa Nutting, Joanna Ruocco, Deb Olin Unferth, Lidia Yuknavitch, et al—and now, Julianna Spallholz. I have been welcomed into homes I should not have been welcomed into, writes Spallholz. I have touched things I probably should not have touched. Hell yeah. Lucky us."