Girl with Oars & Man Dying : Publication Details

Publication date: September 30, 2011
Imprint: Aqueous Books
Trade Paperback
110 pages; 6 " x 9"; $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-9826734-9-2
Publisher: Cynthia Reeser

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Press Release (PDF)
Title Information Page (PDF)
Book Cover: Print | Web

About the Author
J. A. Tyler is founding editor of Mud Luscious Press and author of ten books, including Inconceivable Wilson (Scrambler Books), A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed (Fugue State Press) and, with John Dermot Woods, the image text novel No One Told Me I Would Disappear (Jaded Ibis Press). His fiction and poetry have appeared in Sleepingfish, New York Tyrant, Fairy Tale Review, Caketrain, Diagram, and others. For more, visit: www.mudlusciouspress.com .

Book Description
Girl With Oars & Man Dying is not a story at all. It is not written. It is not about a girl and her father. It is not about a girl and her brother. It is not about their father chopping wood. It is not about their father dying. It is not about the death that their father breathes when he dies. It is not about a last breath. It is not about rape or incest or abortion. It is not about violence. It is not about being above everything, looking down, remembering it all. It is not a story that is written. It is not a story. There is no story. This is no story.

Blurbs | Advance Praise

Everything here, even glass, has motion. Everything, like an oar, moves forward by moving backwards. Patterns echo. The girl is flying, as if anything in J. A. Tyler's work were ever that simple.
― Shape of a Box

J. A. Tyler turns narrative fiction on its head, breaks the rules, & comes up with something spectacular. His style is groundbreaking.
―Underground Voices

J. A. Tyler balances surrealism with vivid, aching pathos. His stories move like pure imagery creating a tonal symphony that totally engrosses.
―Ghoti

Girl with Oars & Man Dying is wind & dust & cough with clouds & oars & flight. Read it aloud & listen. Then wait--just wait–for the ending, which is spectacular.
―Willows Wept Review

If fiction is meant to reveal glimpses of the human experience, then J. A. Tyler has enriched it by creating something as miraculous as humanity & as potent as life itself . Mere ‘genius’ is an insult to Tyler's capability & to call him such reduces so much of what he is & what he had done; no, J. A. Tyler is an artist. He is both the funambulist & the net, both his balancing umbrella & the rope.
―The Rome Review

J. A. Tyler explores the last moments of a life though a mastery of words & language. Tyler’s graceful & hypnotic prose captivates the reader, rendering beauty even in death, even as it unravels a life tarnished by despair & promises unfulfilled.
― LITnIMAGE

Like Robert Lopez and Peter Markus, J. A. Tyler will alter your perception of language. Girl with Oars & Man Dying is a dense, poetic book, a hypnotic, heartbreaking volume that delivers touching imagery through exceptional prose.
―decomP

J. A. Tyler's prose moves with the sonics of poetry, creating a kind of stasis – despite the shifts in time and activity – which in some ways recalls Mark Strand's middle period, when he first set aside the miniature for the long meditation. But that which is human in Tyler's tale is far more intertwined with the natural than usual in Strand, with the leafless skyline and the crows in trees, and despite the sometimes surreal imagery, his story's world is more actual and less dreamlike and perhaps, therefore, more deeply haunted.
―elimae