skip to main |
skip to sidebar
thanks to Sarah Heady [ read the review here], who not only had the guts to read the book in the first place but was also able to engage its more alarming contents--"the blunt physicality of child rape"--while navigating with seeming ease China Cowboy's myriad formal experiments: "a network of dreams, self-delusions and mini-universes reveals itself through Nabokovian footnotes, appendices, crime reports, fake nonprofits (Cowboys Against Child Abuse), press releases for suspicious art galleries...."
As a result, Heady writes one of the best reviews of a Tarpaulin Sky Press title, like, ever.
Indeed we'd like to believe that Heady's pithy summation of Short's abilities is also an apt description generally of the work we publish, work in which the author "has expanded and fused the poetic and narrative fields, creating a zone where elegance and grace can gambol with the just-plain-fucked-up."
Early in her China Cowboy review, even Heady's synopsis sears:
A ring of hellfire encompasses La La from the moment of her birth, when the devil himself (“a white dark man”) wraps a searing-hot hand around the breech fetus’ calf and delivers her into the harsh world of Kowloon, 1977. La La’s parents make their living “taking the tourists to an alley stabbing them stealing their stuff,” and the child is used as a prop to gain victims’ trust. Early on, to cover up the odd claw-shaped birthmark on La La’s leg, her mother dresses her in “cowboy boots tube socks,” and Patsy Clone is born: La La’s country star alter ego, her ticket to America, where children “have their own rooms.”
Unfortunately, one of her family’s victims is an American ex-con/soybean farmer/child abductor who sticks around Hong Kong following the assault, and one day La La never comes home from school. Maybe Ren, a.k.a. Bill, a.k.a. William O’Rennessey, is really the devil incarnate, or maybe he’s just one of the devil’s many agents on a confused, globalized earth circa 1989. He is certainly an updated (and actually American) Humbert Humbert whose version of the coveted nymphet is called a “la la” (with a lower-case L). China Cowboy’s heroine is just one of many la las in the world, an unlucky abductee who’s bribable by sugary cereal, plastic microphones and flouncy skirts. And Ren is a man who will do anything the voices tell him—assuming aliases, squirreling away la las in remote corners of the country, wrestling with his own delusions of grandeur and multiple personalities. In China Cowboy, “Hell is red carpeted stairs lined with plastic runners smell of wicked shit”—a particularly cheap and Americanized evil. Ren “goes all the way inside,” and La La never comes out—smuggled through the port of San Francisco, sequestered in a shoddy Missouri cabin, serially raped and, finally, poisoned. But, says Heady, "if this all sounds too hideous to be enjoyable," it's also important to note that
Short infuses the story with kitsch, humor and addictively playful language that balance out the heartbreak. The dark subject matter is made lighter by La La’s protective pantheon of American deities: “Loretta Lynn Patsy Cline Emmylou Harris beautiful cowgirls,” Clint Eastwood, Woody Guthrie. She complains: “In my sleep I am starring in Coal Miner’s Daughter. I am as convincing as Sissy Spacek except I am Chinese and just can’t help it. I can’t.” " The Lovely Bones this ain’t ," says Heady. Instead China Cowboy is
a satanically intricate narrative with seemingly infinite vantage points in space, time and sympathy. After all, Ren isn’t always evil and he’s 'not never the victim,' as Short admits in her acknowledgments.... [China Cowboy] is an account of trauma and the stories people tell themselves to survive, in the larger context of colonialism (1997 representing the British handover of Hong Kong) and cultural tensions between China and America....
Read the entirety of Sarah Heady's review at HTML Giant.
Read more about the book, read excerpts, and order via the official webpage for Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy.
 |
| Cover design by Andrew Shuta. |
Kim's is a "difficult" book, by any definition.
We like that.
China Cowboy is not a platform, a soundbite, a two-party system, monsters v. innocents....
Thus we are delighted to read Travis Macdonald's review on the Fact-Simile Editions blog, aptly titled " Confronting Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy."
Writes Macdonald:
Just like the book’s protagonist, La La, who “...wears all her clothes. Her boots. All three skirts. All the shirts. The panties, many of them...” China Cowboy by Kim Gek Lin Short is an expertly woven story told in tangled layers.
It is the story of an abduction or escape, a brutal love affair or abusive imprisonment, rise to fame or road to perdition, art installation or songbook retrospective. It is each of these things in turn or neither depending on the narrator in charge at any given moment.
Told in turn from the perspectives of each of the book’s primary characters (La La and Ren), China Cowboy is a successfully executed experiment in prosody that simultaneously braids and frays narrative timelines and expectations, bringing the reader to the brink of every sensory extreme and back again. The result is a darkly surreal adventure in perception that leaves one’s nerves exposed and moral fortitude shaken....
Like what you see? Want more?
Save heaps by ordering direct:
$14 includes shipping in the U.S.
(vs. $16 + $3.99 at Amazon)
Add to Cart or order by check
ISBN: 9780982541685
Lyric Novel | 6"x8", 132 pp, pbk, June 2012
Cover design: Andrew Shuta
Save heaps by ordering direct:
$14 includes shipping in the U.S.
(vs. $16 + $3.99 at Amazon)
Add to Cart or order by check
In the technicolor timewarp call Hell, Hong Kong, wannabe cowgirl La La is hellbent on realizing her dream to be a folk-singing sensation, even if it means surviving a dysfunctional relationship with her kidnapper, Ren, who is just hellbent. Ren thinks he’ll win, but La La, dead or alive, always wins.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR CHINA COWBOY
"Heated and heartbreaking.... guiding us expertly over the bluegrass, bodies and Time Warps of Hell, child abuse, power and Country Music"—RAUAN KLASSNIK
“Moving between the explicit descriptions of the Marquis de Sade and the implicit ironies of Nabokov, these pieces are excruciatingly compelling, so infernal as they are related in languages variously pornographic and desperately, radically tender.... A bold, imaginative, timely work from a courageous and complex thinker." —HEIDI LYNN STAPLES
"More hydra than hybrid, a slim monster sprouting new directions for form, narrative, culture, and identity."—CHRISTIAN TEBORDO
"La La and Ren are as searing as any characters I’ve encountered....”—CHRIS TONELLI
Read more, including excerpts, at the TSky Press official webpage for Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy.
Elizabeth Hildreth at BookSlut interviews TSky Press author Kim Gek Lin Short ( The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits, 2010; China Cowboy, forthcoming, 2011), discussing "among other things, the David Bowie Method, poems who wear cheap prose wigs, establishing a sort of cahoots with the villain, hallucinating Clint Eastwood (musical accompaniment and all), chafing against the words “strange” and “experimental,” and being considered the 2010 poetry It Girl."
Tarpaulin Sky Press Authors in the News
 Kim Gek Lin Short is the focus of a fab interview-ish essay in InDigest, wherein she recounts the joy of sending work to TSky Press's open reading period:
Christian Peet phoned me to say they’d like to publish it. I kept hoping I was not dreaming this conversation. Had I my druthers, Tarpaulin Sky was the press I would have chosen to publish this work. Why? I like their books and think that they have an identity I get as a reader. I feel this way about a number of small presses, but I had this hunch that if only one person in this world was going to love my book, it might be someone at TSKY. Oh, and right she was.
 Kim also details some of her experiences in writing The Bugging Watch, gives us a sneak peak at China Cowboy (also forthcoming from TSky Press) and discusses that much-maligned-of-late concept, "hybridity":
I didn’t set out to make these two books “hybrid.” And quite honestly I did not even use that term to describe my work until somewhat recently, after both books were well underway. And although I wonder about calling my books fiction-slash-poetry, because it is just as easy to call them not fiction and not poetry, I think it is a truthful designation. Also, the term hybrid alone can and should be problematic as a category. This is also why the term hybrid is so useful. Of course, there is always the thrill of creating a new category, and the danger of enacting rules. But whenever I read something that poses poetry on a categorical high horse in a big snooze purist way, I think: this book is a real asshole. . . .
* * *
 Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions is reviewed at the new TriQuarterly Online. Here's an excerpt:
Joanna Ruocco’s newest short-story collection is a keen manipulation of ordinary experiences into strange, funny, lovely, uncomfortable truths. “Chipmunk,” for instance, features a narrator who ponders her insecurities and then reflects on the absurdity of relationships: “I know that with my eyes shut I could kiss a whole parade of men and never guess the difference, even if one of them was my brother.” . . . Ruocco is consistently inventive. She tilts the world as we know it, challenging our senses. With stories that average just a couple of pages, the brevity of Ruocco’s pieces makes it easy to zip through them—don’t. Don’t even read them in sequence. Each will stand alone, and will probably stand taller that way. [Read the full review.]
* * *  TSky Press author Ana Božičević is interviewed at 3AM Magazine, wherein she at once edifies, inspires, and melts us (as is her way) and holds forth on "home," among other slippery subjects. Here's an excerpt:
3:AM: I’m interested in your relationship with Croatia, emotionally, creatively. . . . Do you feel an indelible nostalgia for Croatia?
AB: I remember thinking I wasn’t in love with anyone at the time, so there was no real reason for me to stay. Probably the truth is I knew I wasn’t entirely “of Croatia” even then, and so I was free to go. . . . Nostalgia thinks there’s a place where there is no place, and in its honest, touching delusion it’s no different than any other lover. * * *
TSky Press author Traci O. Connor holds forth on "The Difficulties of Being Human (and of Writing)" at The Story Prize, wherein, in addition to smashing drywall, she offers this rather moving description of Recipes for Endangered Species:
Every story in my collection is pretty much about this: As human beings we often fail to see other human beings as human beings. We see each other often as something less or, at best, monstrous, and, eventually, we begin to see ourselves thus. The characters in my stories all deal, to some degree, with the ways in which they feel themselves monstrous, the ways in which they act out their monstrosities – in short, they deal with the difficulties of being human. * * *
 Last Friday kicked off not one but five weeks of Free-Book-Fridays at LitDrift, where the free books = Tarpaulin Sky Press titles. How amazing is that? We think: "pretty darn." This week's featured free book is Danielle Dutton's Attempts at a Life.
To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment at LitDrift. Winners are chosen randomly at 12pm on the following Friday and notified via email. No kidding. Check it out.
* * *
|
