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

Notifications, re 2010 Open Reading Period for Full-length Manuscripts

too much goodness

Notification has begun in earnest and will continue throughout the week.

Writers who sent manuscripts via email will receive notification via email. Writers who sent manuscripts via post and included an SASE will receive notification via post. Writers who sent manuscripts via post but did not include an SASE will receive no notification other than an announcement, sometime next week, on this blog (and Facebook, Twitter, etc), as we assume that was the idea behind skipping the SASE.

Every year, this gets more difficult. Not the logistics, but the decisions. Please stop writing good things. Or, rather, just one of you write something good. The rest of you write easy-to-reject crap. OK? That would help a lot.

xo
The Management

Sunday Roundup & A Valentine

Do or rue . . .

Who would have thought February could be so hot? Well, for publication opportunities, anyway. Har har. But it's also a short month, and right now you have precisely half of it left to submit a little bit of work to the next issue of Tarpaulin Sky, and to submit your magnum opus to the 2011 Fence Modern Poets Series. Both reading periods come but once a year. Like Elvis said, "It's now or never."

TSky Peeps in the News

Should reading periods and contests and Valentine's Day and concepts like "acceptance" and "rejection" give you the willies, fear not: TSky's own living patron saint, Rebecca Brown, writes about "failure" in a recent issue of Seattle's (only) newspaper The Stranger, invoking those writers forever synonymous with failure, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, as well as sketching their obvious parallels with The Flaming Lips and Korean ceramic artist Young Sook Park. Writes Rebecca:

I often need to remind myself that I need to hear failure out, because by failing at doing an easy thing, a groupthink thing, a thing one has been taught to do for one's career, one might be encouraged to make or do or be something more original and true. Because failing as an artist is a necessary thing, a thing I wish I could more easily accept.

If you haven't already checked out Rebecca's latest, American Romances, please do.

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If you were sad to see Joyelle McSweeney go, you can take comfort that not only is The Constant Critic back in action, but that's it's being helmed by Karla Kelsey--who, it so happens, is also a new Poetry Editor at Tarpaulin Sky.

More good news: reviewers Jordan Davis and Ray McDaniel remain on staff, and are now joined by Christina Mengert and Vanessa Place. Does it get any better than that?

Yes, actually. The CC has also vowed to bring us "a new review every single week of 2010," which is just nuts, and they've begun with a review of Aase Berg's With Deer, translated by Johannes Göransson (who, among things, will soon have a book out with Tarpaulin Sky Press), along with reviews of Graham Foust's A Mouth in California, Claudia Keelan's Missing Her, Andrea Lambert's and 750910-2155's [sic] Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin: Extrapolations on Los Angeles, Lisa Olstein's Lost Alphabet, Mathew Timmons's Credit, and Elizabeth Marie Young's Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize.

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Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay is micro-reviewed by John Findura, at elimae

As Antoine de St. Exupery wrote in Le Petit Prince, "Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them".... Andrew Zornoza does it with style and grace.

as well as by Jason Pettus, here, and Derek White, here.

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TSky Editor Sandy Florian and TSky Press author Joshua Marie Wilkinson both have new books coming out--which may not shock you, given that, like the Beastie Boys' Paul Revere, they are in demand--but what you may not know is this: their books mark the first single-author titles from the publishers of the online & print magnificence that is Sidebrow, and is now also Sidebrow Books.

Also: the books are full-color. Also: Florian's On Wonderland & Waste features collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie, and Wilkinson's Selenography features polaroids by Califone's Tim Rutili.

Yeah. That's we're talking about. But that's also why we'll shut up now and just embed some previews, for your perusing pleasure:





Both books are available now for preorder at a special discounted rate of $30 for the pair (25% off the cover price), and are also available separately for $18 (10% off).

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Factory School announces the publication of Heretical Texts, Volume 5: TOWN, by Kate Schapira; Green-Wood, by Allison Cobb; Underground National, by Sueyeun Juliette Lee; House Envy of All the World, by Simone White; and The City Real & Imagined, by CAConrad & Frank Sherlock.

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And speaking of big announcements (& Valentines)

Kevin Sampsell is not just fab author and publisher. Not just a champion of small presses all around. Not just the guy who--bless him--buys our books for Powell's. Though he may bill himself as a "common pornographer," he is, in fact, a big ol' Romantic, an absolute sap:

The longtime Powell's employee proposed to his girlfriend, Frayn Masters, in front of more than 100 people, many of them friends and colleagues, who had gathered at the West Burnside bookstore to hear Sampsell talk about his new memoir A Common Pornography. Sampsell dropped to one knee and held out a plastic ring ("a placeholder") to a surprised and delighted Masters, who hugged and kissed Sampsell before saying "yes" into the microphone. The audience clapped and cheered and Sampsell and Masters cried and hugged some more, then Sampsell sat down at a table and started signing books.

Congrats, Frayn & Kevin!

OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS: TARPAULIN SKY LITERARY JOURNAL

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 Open for Submissions of Full-Length Manuscripts: October 2009

During the month of October, Tarpaulin Sky Press will be reading full-length manuscripts of poetry, fiction, and cross-genre work. Manuscripts should be postmarked between October 1 and October 31, 2009. There is no need to query first; simply mail the manuscript according to the directions below.

Please send one copy of your manuscript along with two copies of the title page (note: the reading process is not "blind"--we ask for two title pages only so that we may keep one with the manuscript, and the other for reference/notes, etc). Be sure that your title pages include your name, address, telephone number, and email address.

Cover letters are read with interest. We like to know who your are, what you're up to, and where we can read more of your work.

We do accept simultaneous submissions but ask that you let us know immediately if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Individual pieces from the manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, anthologies, and short-run chapbooks, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished. Manuscripts will not be returned. Please do not send us your only copy.

Writers who have not been published in our literary journal should include a $20 reading fee in the form of a check or a money order made payable to Tarpaulin Sky Press. Past contributors to Tarpaulin Sky may submit their manuscript with a $10 reading fee. Current subscribers to Tarpaulin Sky Press do not need to include a reading fee (you've already done plenty to support the press--thank you). Everyone submitting a manuscript is welcome also to choose from any TSky Press trade paperback (sorry, no chapbooks)--just let us know which title you would like, and enclose with your submission packet a 9x12, self-addressed, stamped envelope with $2.64 in postage. We will ship the books separately from your notification SASE.

Mail your submission to

Tarpaulin Sky Press
PO Box 189
Grafton, VT 05146

For notification of decisions, include a business-size SASE. If you would like to receive acknowledgment of the receipt of your manuscript, please include a stamped, self-addressed postcard. Notification of decisions will be made in February 2010. Publication of accepted manuscripts will be in 2010 & 2011.

If you are not familiar with our press and the type of books that we publish, we encourage you to explore our work before submitting, by purchasing one of our titles.

Notes for 16 March 09

1. We have finally made it through all full-length manuscripts and will announce new titles within the week.

2. Cynthia Reeser reviews Mark Cunningham's "beautifully designed" (thank you, Ms. Reeser) Body Language and interviews Mark (wherein he discloses what we've always suspected: "the book as a whole has for its ideal readers curious children and space aliens") at Prick of the Spindle.

3. Craig Santos Perez reviews Jenny Boully's one love affair at Rattle.

4. "Hypocrite Lecteur" Tim Marcuson, new to blogging, commits an early post to kind words about GC Waldrep's chap, which, it so happens, has now officially sold out.

5. And TSky has posted new reviews as well:

a. Sidebrow#2 reviewed by AD Jameson
b. Denise Newman's Wild Goods, reviewed by Aidan Thompson
c. Anne Blonstein's memory's morning, reviewed by Kathrin Schaeppi
d. Dmitry Golynko's As It Turns Out, reviewed by Eireene Nealand

6. Justin Mark's new chapbook, Voir Dire, is now available from Rope-a-Dope Press. Letterpressed in an edition of 96, one would be hardpressed to spend $8--which includes shipping--more wisely.

7. Shampoo Issue 35 features a section of poetry from Germany (in German with English translations) brought to you by Guest Editors Ron Winkler and Christian Lux, as well as a special section from Guest Editor Ronald Palmer. Poets & translators include Stephanie Young, Uljana Wolf, Jan Wagner, David Trinidad, Thien Tran, Barbara Thimm, Mark Terrill, Brian Teare, Gary Sullivan, Ramsey Scott, Tom Schulz, Katharina Schultens, Sabine Scho, JD Schneider, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Andre Rudolph, Jan Volker Röhnert, Lawrence Rinder, Nikola Richter, Kevin Prufer, Georgina Paul, Ethan Paquin, Danielle Pafunda, Peter Nickowitz, Daniel Nester, Steph Morris, Sara Larsen, Norbert Lange, Wayne Koestenbaum, Kevin Killian, Ernst Herbeck, Duriel E. Harris, Catherine Hales, Matthias Goeritz, Jane Gibian, Iain Galbraith, Johannes CS Frank, Michael Farrell, Daniel Falb, Carl Christian Elze, Peter Covino, Ann Cotten, CAConrad, Jenny Boully, Jennifer Blowdryer, Nico Bleutge, Mark Bibbins, Susan Bernofsky, Dodie Bellamy, Toby Axelrod & Shane Allison, with scratch&sniff ShampooArt by Otto Chan. Edited by Del Ray Cross.

Open Reading Period: Full-Length Manuscripts

Tarpaulin Sky Press will be reading full-length manuscripts (48+ pages) submitted during the month of October. There is no need to query first; simply mail the manuscript according to the directions below.

Manuscripts should be postmarked between October 1 and October 31, 2008. Writers who have not been published in our literary journal should include a $20 reading fee in the form of a check or a money order made payable to Tarpaulin Sky Press. Past contributors to Tarpaulin Sky may submit their manuscript with a $10 reading fee.

Send one copy of your manuscript along with two copies of the title page (note: the reading process is not "blind"--we ask for two title pages only so that we may keep one with the manuscript, and the other for reference/notes, etc). Be sure that your title pages include your name, address, telephone number, and email address. Cover letters are read with interest. We like to know who your are, what you're up to, and where we can read more of your work. We do accept simultaneous submissions but ask that you let us know immediately if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Individual pieces from the manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, anthologies, and short-run chapbooks, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished. Manuscripts will not be returned. Please do not send us your only copy.

Mail your submission to

Tarpaulin Sky Press
PO Box 189
Grafton, VT 05146

For notification of decisions, include a business-size SASE. If you would like to receive acknowledgment of the receipt of your manuscript, please include a stamped, self-addressed postcard. Notification of decisions will be made in February 2008. Publication of accepted manuscripts will be in 2009 & 2010.

If you are not familiar with our press and the type of books that we publish, we encourage you to explore our work before submitting, by clicking here and purchasing one of our titles.