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 Abe for getting a free copy of Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Nylund, the Sarcographer by Joyelle McSweeney. “If Vladimir Nabokov wanted to seduce Nancy Drew, he’d read her Nylund one dark afternoon over teacups of whiskey” (Kate Bernheimer). Nylund, the Sarcographer is a baroque noir. Its eponymous protagonist is a loner who tries to comprehend everything from the outside, like a sarcophagus, and with analogously ornate results. Like negative capability on steroids, Nylund’s ultra-susceptibility entangles him in both a murder plot and a plot regarding his missing sister—plots, such as they are, that read as “flights of campy-cum-lyrical post-Ashberyan prose” where “language dissolves into stream-of-consanguinity post-surrealism and then resolves into a plot again” (Stephen Burt, Poetry Foundation Blog). “Caution,” warns Bookslut: “If you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you’d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you. . . . Other than the incomparable Ben Marcus, I’m not sure anyone in contemporary letters can compete with the voracity of ingenuity, complexity, and beauty of McSweeney’s usage.” Says Michael Martone: “You thought you knew your own language. This book hands it back to you on a platter and includes the instructional manual for its further use” (Michael Martone).

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
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• Become our friend on Twitter & Facebook

Winner will be chosen randomly at 12pm on Friday, September 10 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 SHERI. Check out the new Free Book Friday, featuring Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay.