Fiction | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
TELLING LIES AND CALLING IT LITERATURE SINCE 2003 | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Fiction | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
TELLING LIES AND CALLING IT LITERATURE SINCE 2003 | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Kami Westhoff, excerpts from “What the Blood Tells You to Be”
"The sky is already more bruise than bright.... We say to each other You never know, though we’re mothers. We’ve never not known." — from Kami Westhoff's What the Blood Tells You to Be, shortlisted for Tarpaulin Sky's 2019 Book Awards.
Carole Maso: excerpt from “The Bay of Angels,” a novel-in-progress
"A green and downy sheet of sounds. You make a most extraordinary music. A beautiful music--boots cannot drown out, soldiers cannot outcount. We remember...hiding inside every leaf. Shining through the paper thin. Chlorophylled awhile."
Miranda Metelski, Excerpts from “Resisting the Book of a Woman Possessed”
“Spiders crawl down my thighs, across my abdomen. A kind of scholarly pornography.” — from Miranda Metelski’s Resisting the Book of a Woman Possessed, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
Bridget Brewer, excerpt from “Beasts of Revelation”
"A flash of lightning from outside the cave, a brief illumination: snake heads, so many snake heads, swaying inches from the tip of her nose. ‘Emmeline,’ the heads say together in a language not legible above ground. ‘O crooked, ugly Emmeline: you are blessed.’" -- from Bridget Brewer's Beasts of Revelation, semifinalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
Fiction by Garett Strickland: “Gills”
“we weren’t so stupid. we’d done our reading, even there in school. we knew of the deformities. we’d seen the portraits in our history book – the habsburgs with their horrible lips, their jaws. mental retardation, et cetera. we knew, we knew. but that wasn’t what we were doing.”
Sandy Florian, The Chair
"Having climbed all five thousand stairs of the towering high-rise, OUR AUTHOR, in a red state of rage, erupts wildly into the room, and there, seeing that he was late to the conference, seeing that there were already so many authors at the table already, a million authors with a billion inflections, OUR AUTHOR thinks to himself that to pose even a single assertion, to converse with even a single poet, simply would not do...." Excerpts from Sandy Florian’s prose manuscript, The Chair, a finalist for the 2015 TS Book Prize.
Julia Brennan, excerpt from “Hunting Season”
"He was my teacher. He was teaching me how to be explicit in my work, and in his bed, we were doing very explicit things. Secretly, he and I slept in a sunroom in the back of his house, and I called him mother and he called me child. It was an incest game we played." — from Julia Brennan's Hunting Season, co-winner of the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.
Vincent James, excerpt from “Doomsday”
"We’d never been kept out past dusk. Never bottomed out to transcendent panorama. Never thrived in the unholy glower of the mountain-perched bighorns." — from Vincent James' Doomsday, shortlisted for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.
Kami Westhoff, excerpts from “What the Blood Tells You to Be”
"The sky is already more bruise than bright.... We say to each other You never know, though we’re mothers. We’ve never not known." — from Kami Westhoff's What the Blood Tells You to Be, shortlisted for Tarpaulin Sky's 2019 Book Awards.
Carole Maso: excerpt from “The Bay of Angels,” a novel-in-progress
"A green and downy sheet of sounds. You make a most extraordinary music. A beautiful music--boots cannot drown out, soldiers cannot outcount. We remember...hiding inside every leaf. Shining through the paper thin. Chlorophylled awhile."