Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner DT for getting a free copy of One Story Issue #137, “The Puppet” by Reif Larsen.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton. “An important new literary voice” crafting “expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops” (Rain Taxi), Danielle Dutton operates somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises, constantly pushing out towards something new. In “S&M,” a marriage suffers from the words you were always missing: sky, loft, music, dogs, pipes, puppets, war. In “Mary Carmichael,” a woman with a pair of scissors and the need to cut out her insatiable desire slices a veiled hat from a fern in a pot and a river out of a postbox. In stories that find movement wherever they turn, in every phrase and cadence, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions—”alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time” (Robert Glück)—Danielle Dutton “writes with a deft explosiveness that craters the page with stunning, unsettling precision” (Laird Hunt). Attempts at a Life is “serious, but as many dramatists celebrate: comedy orbits a dark sun. Which is to say, this is also a very funny book” (Selah Saterstrom, American Book Review).
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tarpaulin Sky Press. Via manuscripts received during open reading periods (September and October, 2010) Tarpaulin Sky Press publishes innovative poetry, fiction, and hybrid texts, producing trade paperbacks, hand-bound books, and a literary journal that appears both online and on paper. Featured in venues as diverse as After Ellen, HTML Giant, and Poets & Writers, Tarpaulin Sky’s titles are regularly reviewed in Publishers Weekly as well as American Book Review, Bloomsbury Review, Bookslut, Jacket, and Rain Taxi. Ranked among “Great Titles from Underground Presses,” by Time Out New York, Tarpaulin Sky’s books also routinely appear on the “Bestsellers” list at Small Press Distribution. Tarpaulin Sky’s literary magazine has published hundreds of new and familiar writers such as Chris Abani, Jenny Boully, Rebecca Brown, Brian Evenson, Noah Eli Gordon, Matthea Harvey, Brian Henry, Bhanu Kapil, Eleni Sikelianos, Juliana Spahr, G.C. Waldrep, and John Yau—in addition to at least one poem by a high-school student and a cartoon drawn by an 8-year-old boy.
To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is comment in the space below. Make sure to tell us your email address so we can contact you if you win! We also recommend doing the following:
- Subscribe to the Tarpaulin Sky blog
- Become Tarpaulin Sky’s friend on Twitter & Facebook
- Sign up for our newsletter
- Become our friend on Twitter & Facebook
Winner will be chosen randomly at 12pm on Friday, September 3 and notified via email. The winner must respond to our email within 48 hours, or a new winner will be randomly selected.
Good luck!
EDIT: Giveaway now closed. Congrats to this week’s winner ABE. Check out the new Free Book Friday, featuring Nylund, the Sarcographer by Joyelle McSweeney.
