Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items
Weblink
www.taraison.com

BALL

Tara Ison

Tara Ison's debut story collection exploring the darker edges of love, sex and death and how they are intimately and often violently connected. BALL presents vivid stories set mostly in contemporary Los Angeles.

In “Cactus” a young girl grows to fear the outside world following the freakish, accidental death of her adventure-seeking naturalist boyfriend in the California desert; in “Wig” a woman must help her best friend face life-threatening cancer while covering up an unseemly affair with her friend’s husband; and in the collection’s stunning title story, the bonds of friendship and pet ownership collide in startling and unexpected ways.

Tara Ison is the author of Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies (Soft Skull 2015). Also The List (Scribner 2007), A Child Out of Alcatraz (Faber 1997), and Rockaway (Soft Skull 2013). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies.

Available products
Book Published 2015-11-01 by Soft Skull
Book Published 2015-11-01 by Soft Skull

Comments

The stories in Ball take place at the far limits of obsession and desire and lust, exploring the dangers of turning toward the kinds of love we have tried always to refuse. Tara Ison is a fearless writer, and her bravery before the dark urges of the heart thrills on every page.

Tara Ison is the mistress of bad behavior. She divines the beauty in darkness. She twists the familiar—a friendship, an apology—till something fantastic cracks. And she will have you in thrall to her gorgeous language. The stories in Ball are exquisite and harrowing. Must read straight through. Must remember to breathe.

Each tale in Ison's story collection, seemingly innocuous, delves into a dark examination of inappropriate behavior: affairs, self-mutilation, shocking deaths; no faux pas stone is left unturned. But with her expert writing and willingness to push boundaries the grotesqueness and horrors are bearable, even beautiful.

Set mostly in Los Angeles, Ball is a collection of stories about desire. Twisted, dark, and wild, the stories in Ball focus on characters seeking love, adventure, and attention that is deeply intense and crushing. Ison, who has also written Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies and A Child Out of Alcatraz, is a talented writer who may have slipped under your radar. Be prepared to become obsessed. Read more...

Tara Ison's stories locate the pleasure in pain, the victory in betrayal, the beauty in depravity—they walk the line between love and debasement. In the end, Ison's characters are knots of selfish interest and desire, clinging to any warm body as death grows near, achingly human in her portrayal.

Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Issue No. 180, Rick Moody (Author of Hotels of North America) selects BALL: ... Tara Ison, for all her modesty and stealth, is a real voice for our times, and what she has to say is, e.g., that nothing is sacred, and desperation doesn’t have to be melodramatic, and that le mot juste is still the only acceptable approach. You will not forget having read this one.

...captivating and disturbing...These stories find a strange sweet spot between the mundane and the horrific. They may shock but they also provoke, with many leading to an unexpected, and not always happy, ending. Read more...