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Hey there, recession vics: Good news. Free Book Friday at LitDrift "gives you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing," and right now, "the best titles in indie publishing" = Tarpaulin Sky Press titles, but of course!
This week it's Traci O. Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species, wherein--in addition to copious b&w photos of some frightening cocktails--a dying lover plans to become a zombie, an anxious woman cant decide if she’s animal or human, and Jesus the size of a pencil lurks beneath the bed. Monsters, monsters, everywhere, and yet Publishers Weekly calls these fictions “tender, aching love stories.” Go figure!
Lyrical, darkly funny, sometimes outright disturbing, this collection explores the secret desires that render people not only imperfect and dangerous, but also authentically human. Says Brian Evenson: “These deftly written stories rear and buck against the confines of the traditional story collection, bursting out in images and recipes, galloping back and forth between traditional paragraphs and alternate forms. . . . Even though you're moving fast enough that you could end up anywhere, Connor's thought about every single word, every gesture, and she can turn each story on a dime. This is a marvelous debut."
Now shuffle your broke behind on over to LitDrift and score yourself not only some reading material for those long lines at the food shelf, but also some cocktail recipes to ease the pain . . .
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.
* * *
 Via Diagram's new issue, Matt Dube reviews Traci O. Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species
Says Dube: "Points of view shift and tilt, almost imperceptibly, and bring you to understand identity differently than what you previously allowed for: these disparate voices, these parallax views, the linguistic franks belong together, the stories say, and the way Connor bends and warps language in humid paragraphs, doesn't let you argue."
Nor will we argue. Click here to read the full review.
Click here to check out Traci's book, which, you should know, contains many frightening cocktail recipes as well as photos of dolls sans limbs.
* * *
Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.
The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.
This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.
If you would like to submit work for consideration, please contact editors Amy King & Heidi Lynn Staples: http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/Recent contributors include Frank Sherlock, Brooks Haxton, Angela Sorby, T. Clayton Wood, Ron Silliman, Tamiko Beyer, Judith Barrington, James Wagner, Julian T. Brolaski, Lisanne Thompson, Jan Heller Levi, Sam Schild, Alison Pelegrin, Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Paul Ryan, Nicole Cooley, Rodrigo Toscano, Joseph P. Wood, Gordon Massman, Tara Betts, Fady Joudah, Philip Metres, Jeff Newberry, Kirsten Kaschock, Patrick Durgin, Alicia Ostriker, Carly Sachs, Kate Schapira, Bill Marsh, Evie Shockley and Franz Wright. * * *
Traci O Connor has new work in PANK. * * *
Carrie Olivia Adams takes " a brief look at writers who are using the dictionary as the structuring architecture of a chapbook," including Jeanne Morel's sold-out chap, That Crossing Is Not Automatic. * * *
Amy Henry reviews Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay* * *
TSky editor Laynie Browne's The Desires of Letters is out from Counterpath. "Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again" (Anne Waldman). Prose, verse, letters, and plays, The Desires of Letters is a passionate commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war and becomes "transformative . . . [in] its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time" (Juliana Spahr). * * *
TSky contributor Lance Phillips' These Indicium Tales is out from Ahsahta. Both sensuous and sensual, These Indicium Tales continues Lance Phillips’ meditations on the body. Here, the indicia—markings or symbols—are birds, insects, and flowers, but rather than standing for the body, they stand with it in an exploration that refuses to romanticize nature. In this phenomenology of eros, where Phillips writes “I can't think of a way of continuing that is not sexually charged,” no word is wasted. Though lines stutter and jam together, though syntax is disrupted and interwoven with silence, the language itself remains delicious on the tongue, even when read silently—which is precisely the sort of conundrum these Tales love to raise and leave in ambiguity. * * *
& Black Clock strikes again.
Publishers Weekly reviews Traci O Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species
. . . These stories constitute some tender, aching love stories. Connor's characters are curious specimens who don't quite fit in, but have rich inner lives, such as Zha Zha, the chronically unfaithful exotic dancer in “The Flying Codona” (“tits are made of cantaloupe and she eats them with a spoon”), whose lovelorn boyfriend consoles himself by dreaming of being a trapeze artist. “Starla and June” is a creepy, Hitchcockian tale about an unraveling love affair involving a prosthetic hand that offers words of courage and strength: “Oh, Pet, she'll be back,” says the hand. “Van Gogh Dreams” juxtaposes vivid descriptions of flowers with excerpts from the painter's late asylum notebooks to evoke the chilling stream-of-consciousness of a troubled narrator. “Monkey Teeth” is a kind of nut job's notebook, full of Lolita-like obsession (including photographs). Cocktail recipes conclude each of the stories in this varied and occasionally unnerving debut collection. [Click here for the full review.]
Jeremy Benson at NewPages reviews Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits
The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is under a porch, is between the fridge and the cupboard, is hiding among the coats and sweaters in the tilted closet above the basement stairs. Its shapeshifting and heartbreak is nightmarishly microscopic and horrifically asymptotical. . . . Short’s prose poems have the exactitude of obsessive compulsion, yet the imagery and dimness of an opiate trip sponsored by Lewis Caroll – “And the tiny book became the word for rainbow and spilled into Harlan’s many gloved hands.” She frequently stretches the parameters of grammar, rearranging conventional syntax to just off kilter; her written style as surreal as her yarn-and-insect imagery. The result is a terrifying, ungraspable split-level love story: futile, sad and beautiful. [Click here for the full review.]
Sonora Review's Editor, Jake Levine, reviews Shelly Taylor's Black-Eyed Heifer
Shelly Taylor’s first collection Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky) inhabits the possibilities of language, indigenous in its diction, but radically unfamiliar in its jagged syntax and extended lines. This is neither an experimental or pastoral poetry, but a fusion of speech and intellect that reflect a poet who is deeply rooted in the earth, its dirt and concrete, its horses and cats, but speaks in a rhythm that explodes into space, taps into the pacing of a 21st century phantasmagoric, recollected, American landscape and self. If you made Robert Creeley write lines the length of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon says I love you, gave them both the sensibility and precise diction of a contemporary Emily Dickinson riding on a horse fast enough to get from Athens to Brooklyn in 10 minutes, then you’d get something like Taylor’s poems. The pacing is high octane, pyrotechnic, but the discursive function of the content is old school, familiar, and impressively defiant. [Click here for the full review.]
Trinie Dalton, at Fanzine, reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions
Part of what compelled me to read Man’s Companions was my curiosity about a fellow author who had also pondered “Unicorns.” This story, I happily report, is one of the highlights of the book. In it, an embittered writer ruminates on writer’s block, while processing jealousy of her prolific boyfriend by reducing his success to ‘phallogocentrism.’ “When I am not writing, I feel bad. But when I am writing, I am usually not writing. I feel bad. I sit in front of the computer doing small, surreptitious things to my body. When Dave is writing, his…posture is excellent and his fingers never stop moving across the keyboard…” She arrives at the phallus via noting Dave’s confidence, his efficient practice, and his boarding school education. “Whimsy,” she writes, “is how the phallogocentric artists try to hide the phallus. They hide the phallus right there in the open, with unicorns.” Even in this passage, one notices Ruocco’s peculiar writing style, in which short sentences show logical ideas leading to the next in almost robotic bursts. Then they leap somewhere else completely, recalling Lydia Davis’s grammatical, poetic math. [Click here for the full review--which begins with a review of TSky-friend Kevin Sampsell's A Common Pornography.]
And in case you missed it a couple weeks ago: Publishers Weekly reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions
Thirty-one brief, clever tales from the author of The Mothering Coven employ traits from the animal kingdom to underscore absurdities in the human species. 'Lemmings,' for example, features a desultory dialogue between two lovers who debate the better 'iconic' location to jump from—the Space Needle or the Empire State Building. . . . Satisfyingly developed, such as the nuttily obtuse 'Flying Monkeys,' featuring a rarely intersecting conversation between two women onboard an airplane that reveals how the women—former best friends who happen to sit next to each other—can't stand each other. . . . Ruocco's understated humor and irony have a playful, experimental appeal. [Click here for the fill review.]
 Hola and howdy, readers and friends,
During the month of February we will be reading submissions for the next paper edition of Tarpaulin Sky. We hope you'll give it a go, and send your best, as this is the only submission period for the magazine this year.
We're trying something new, too--well, new to us--the online submission manager. So you'll be able to keep tabs on the status of your submission throughout the process.
Also new this year are many of the journal's editors: Blake Butler and Joanna Howard editing Fiction; Laynie Browne and Karla Kelsey editing Poetry; and Sandy Florian and Lily Hoang editing "Other"; presided over by Editor in Chief Colie Collen, with all submissions shepherded through the process by Associate Editors Duncan B. Barlow, Jamey Dunham, and Christine Wertheim, as well as Assistant Editors Michael Tod Edgerton and Brian Mihok.
Please visit our guidelines for all the deets.
SEE YOU AT AWP DENVER?
We hope so. TSky authors and editors will be reading from new books and selling them as well, and we'll be joining our favorite presses for various kickass events: readings with Action Books, Apostrophe Books, Astrophil Press, Black Ocean, Featherproof Books, and Slope Editions, just to name a few. Events Coordinators Michelle Puckett and Megan DiBello invite you to keep
on top of our events blog for forthcoming details.
IS YOUR BOOKSHELF NOT SO FRESH?
We can fix that. Subscriptions to Tarpaulin Sky Press's forthcoming Spring titles are still available--as are huge savings on forthcoming titles. If you're looking for some of the most exciting literature being published today, you may want to have a look at our catalog, or take a look at some of our forthcoming Spring 2010 titles: Traci O Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species, a book of short fictions that Brian Evenson calls "a marvelous debut. . . . moving fast enough that you could end up anywhere, Connor’s thought about every single word, every gesture, and she can turn each story on a dime" or Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, book of interlocking short fictions / prose poems that Joyelle McSweeney deems "twisted," and Norma Cole calls "irresistible.... with its incantations of quantum teleology, its footnotes & sources.... it is a magnificent work." Also on the way, Joanna Ruocco's book of short fictions, Man's Companions; Shelly Taylor's book of interlocking short fictions / prose poems, Black-Eyed Heifer; and Emily Toder's poetry chapbook, Brushes With.
& Let us not forget the three chapbooks we just picked from the last reading period: Lara Glenum's The Hotling Chronicles: A Horror in Trans; Sarah Goldstein's Fables; and James Haug's Scratch. Plus forthcoming full-lengths-with-really-long-titles, Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate.
LOOKING TO SCORE FREE BOOKS?
 We can help. We have Advanced Reader Copies of all Tarpaulin Sky Press's Spring full-length titles, and we have hundreds of review copies from other publishers, from Ahsahta to Vagabond. Want to review a brand new title from Fence Books? We got 'em. Burning Deck, City Lights, Dalkey Archive, FC2, Graywolf, Salt, Sarabande, Shearsman, Ugly Duckling? No problem. Or how about Counterpath, Dusie, Ellipsis Press, Essay Press, Subito? Or Canada's positively stellar BookThug?
Our Reviews Editor Ross Brighton reads submissions of reviews and interviews all year long. Writers whose work is accepted for publication receive any two Tarpaulin Sky Press trade paperbacks of their choice. Send a brief cover letter and your previously unpublished review to reviews[AT]tarpaulinsky[DOT]com, and be sure to include "Attn: Review Editors" in the subject line. Click here for a list of review copies currently available. Publishers may send review copies to Book Reviews ~ Tarpaulin Sky Press ~ PO Box 189 ~ Grafton, VT 05146
Write some reviews, yo. Get paid. In books.
GOT SOME NEWS TO SHARE YOURDARNSELF?
If you have something to say about a new journal, new book, new press, new reading series; and if said newness will be of interest to the people who read TSky Press's books or journal, or--better yet!--includes TSky Press authors or journal contributors; and if you'd like to share this newness and can do so in a way that includes some chewy content and few superlatives, then please send your brief shoutout, sidebar, or feature article to our News Editor Amish Trivedi at news[AT]tarpaulinsky[DOT]com
OKEEDOKEE
We're probably forgetting as much as we're including, but we hope you'll forgive us.
Send some work!
Cheers,
Christian Peet, Publisher
Colie Collen, Editor in Chief
& Editors, Tarpaulin Sky Press
Tarpaulin Sky Press ISBN: 9780982541623 Fiction | 6"x8", 208 pp, pbk |May 2010 Special pre-order price: $13 includes shipping (vs. $19, later, at Amazon) Or pre-order with PayPal (Ships May 2010): A dying lover plans to become a zombie. An anxious woman can’t decide if she’s animal or human. A Jesus the size of a pencil lurks beneath the bed. Monsters, monsters, everywhere. But are they real or imagined? The stories in Recipes for Endangered Species hinge on this uncertainty. Lyrical, darkly funny, sometimes disturbing, this collection explores the secret desires that render people not only imperfect and dangerous, but also authentically human. Such ambiguity lies at the heart of Traci O Connor’s Recipes for Endangered Species, resulting in strangely beautiful stories obsessed with the unreasonable, the monstrous, and the extraordinary living among—and within—us. These deftly written stories rear and buck against the confines of the traditional story collection, bursting out in images and recipes, galloping back and forth between traditional paragraphs and alternate forms. . . . Even though you’re moving fast enough that you could end up anywhere, Connor’s thought about every single word, every gesture, and she can turn each story on a dime. This is a marvelous debut. —Brian Evenson
Traci O Connor’s subject matter is never easy. Her work cuts to the core, exposing cultural taboos and psychic turmoil. Her use of the fantastic emerges organically from her material, compelling the reader to face her own fears and prejudices, to embrace the monstrous within herself, to live with greater curiosity and compassion. —Melanie Rae Thon
About Traci O Connor
In addition to Recipes for Endangered Species, Connor has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in journals such as Barrow Street, Fourteen Hills, Gargoyle, Margie, Mid-American Review, LIT, and DIAGRAM. She holds an M.F.A. and a PhD from the University of Utah. A writer and assistant professor at Guilford College, she lives with her family in Greensboro, North Carolina.
TSky Press Fall 2009/Spring 2010 subscriptions are now available http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/catalog.html
$60 for six books w/free shipping
(vs. $103.94 from Amazon, or $107 from SPD)
Yes, you read the above correctly. $60 will get you five paperbacks and one chapbook w/ free shipping. & Yes, you'll save around $45.
All first books. All from women writers. Which excites us no end. Although we have always been committed to publishing both new writers and women writers, the 2009/10 subscription series really puts our money where our collective mouth is. Fall 2009 books include Ana Bozicevic's full-length poetry collection, Stars of the Night Commute; Traci O Connor's book of short fictions, Recipes for Endangered Species; and Emily Toder's poetry chapbook, Brushes With. Spring 2010 titles include Joanna Ruocco's book of short fictions, Man's Companions; Kim Gek Lin Short's lyric novella, The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits; and Shelly Taylor's book of interlocking short fictions/prose poems, Black-Eyed Heifer.
As they say in Fargo, “That’s a pretty sweet deal.” We hope you’ll think so, too. Please consider renewing your subscription and continuing to support TSky Press and its mission—which, in this case, includes publishing young women writers whose work, we’re willing to bet, you’ll be reading—and reading about—for years to come.
Please visit our catalog at http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/catalog.html to order online or pay by check.
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