Three by Tuite
Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2023
300 pages
Cowboy Jamboree Press is proud to present, now back in print, 3 outstanding works from Meg Tuite: the chapbook Her Skin is a Costume, the novel Domestic Apparitions, and the short story collection Bound by Blue.
“Any novel that wants to portray the truth of our short time on this planet has to be about failure and tragedy first and foremost, even if interlaced with moments of grace, hilarity and beauty. This Tuite does handily.”
—The Nervous Breakdown
“A poignant ride through different phases of the protagonist’s life, Do- mestic Apparition is funny, sarcastic, dark, reflective, and touching.”
—New Pages
“Meg Tuite is like Sissy Spacek in the movie Carrie when they dump pig blood on her, but instead of setting the prom on fire, she ignites your brain using dark and mysterious word torches.”
—Brian Ellis
“It’s hard not to feel the range of human emotion when you read Bound by Blue. Meg Tuite’s stories are beautifully painful and painfully beautiful. These characters will stick with you so long, you’ll remember them as people you actually knew.”
—Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Wonder Bread Summer
White Van
Unlikely Books, 2022
106 pages
“Gorgeously brutal, jaggedly mattering, Meg Tuite’s incantations crackle with the clarities of a true visionary. White Van treats the trample and grime of trauma withcleansing ecstasies of language. This book will turn you inside out.”
—Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted
“I’m convinced nobody on earth writes with quite the same level of passion, verve, candor, dark humor, electric intensity, and heart as Meg Tuite. I’ve pronounced this collection my favorite of her works (and I have a bunch of them). Why? It’s the experience of reading it. You read the first sentence. Stop. Read it again. Shake your head. Read it out loud. Marvel. Feel. Look out the window. Read the whole tiny piece (a poem? a story? you’ve long since stopped categorizing these stunning mash-ups). You gasp, you sigh. You read more. You start to gobble these. You mark ones to go back to. Realize you’ve marked them all. A master, a maestro, Tuite is the kind of writer who can balance a jetliner-sized story on the tender tip of a blade of grass and not you or I or anyone else has a clue how she does it.”
—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
Meet My Haze
Big Table Publishing, 2018
114 pages
“Meet My Haze is filled with stories that live between fire, family, the torque of a heart, and tenderness. Meg Tuite shows us the inside-out of our domestic lives, loves, and misadventures, making the hairs on my arms shoot up, or a knot made of art and fuck get stuck in my throat. These are the micro moments that make us. This book made my whole body vibrate.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
“In Meet My Haze, Meg Tuite is writing with one foot in the land of the living and one foot in the land of the dead. And she’s doing it so tenderly that the boundary is blurred, allowing us to cross over and back. We become the dead, which means we also become more alive through her passages. Meg Tuite says in here, ‘It’s a parade of the lonely.’ That’s what each piece of this collection is doing, marching down our streets in a celebratory/grieving journey like a second line funeral in New Orleans.”
—Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat and water & power
Lined Up Like Scars
Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2016
39 pages
Sassy and incisive, tender yet scalpel-sharp, the ten short tales in Lined Up Like Scars cut to the quick of modern life, dissecting the dysfunctional dynamics of an American family with a tragic secret at its heart. Meg Tuite traces girlhood, young womanhood, and the jealous loyalties of sisterhood through a series of ‘magpie moments’ that are often darkly funny – featuring inedible meatloaf, sloughed skin, mysterious boy-bodies, insurgent underwear, speed-dating with attitude, the street-stomping antics of a wannabe band, and an unnerving collector of American Girl dolls. But the comic coping strategies of children (licking walls, ingesting gym socks, humping stuffed animals) have chronic counterparts in those of adults (alcoholism, prescription drugs). And in the final story, an ageing father reveals a truth that his daughters will forever conceal behind Facebook façades.
Grace Notes
Unknown Press, 2015
58 pages
A stunning collaboration from Meg Tuite (prose), David Tomaloff (poetry), and Keith Higginbotham (collages), who’ve blended their work together in a powerful display that is all of these things: crushing, mind altering, odd in the ways that shine. The pieces in GRACE NOTES search the hearts and consciousness/subconsciousness for any trace of what is unexplored in the human web, to lay it out without apology. Three brilliant artists, caught in a whirlwind.
Bound By Blue
Sententia Books, 2013
186 pages
Meg Tuite’s stories are intense, blinking rooms with mirrored windows and revolving doors. We wear her characters’ scars, and we are haunted by their thoughts. It would all seem terrible if we weren’t so intoxicated by Tuite’s voice, its inviting, fragrant nectar; she writes requiems for fever dreams.”
—Jen Michalski, author of The Tide King and Could You Be With Her Now
Her Skin Is a Costume
80 page chapbook
8.5″ x 5.5″ three signature chapbook with hand sewn binding
Short fiction, character studies, dark humor and a poetic language twist. Meg’s collection is startling, engaging and entertaining.
Domestic Apparition
San Francisco Bay Press, 2012
152 pages
“Meg Tuite’s incendiary Domestic Apparition, an anti-bildungsroman, reads as if Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, Joyce’s Dubliners and a hallucinatory draught of green absinthe all combined to create a secret, rule-less world of precocious siblings punking the piteous yet unrelenting hypocrisies of American family, school and church even as they are swept by childhood’s inexorable current into a compromised, haunted, fragile adulthood. With incisive wit, a poet’s flair for innovative revolt, precisely rendered characters wild for truth and trespass, Tuite’s Domestic Apparition is savage, arch, deeply tender – a triumphant debut novel.”
—Melissa Pritchard, author of eight novels and four short story collections, her latest The Odditorium
Reverberations
Deadly Chaps, 2012
20 pages
Disparate Pathos
Monkey Puzzle Press, 2012
26 pages
Meg Tuite defies all our preconceptions of what it means to be a woman writer. Her use of language always serves the purpose of illuminating the truth of our complicated lives. She never shies away from violence, love, insanity, disappointment nor chaos. Tuite is equal parts disturbing, hilarious, moving and spot on observant.
—Paula Bomer, author of Baby and other stories
Meg Tuite is all lungs and fists and brawl. Her sentences read like floor plans to elegant ballrooms used as fronts for seedy all night gambling joints. The kind where clever lines are currency, and grins draw blood like switchblade knives. In short, Meg tells her stories with sleeves rolled up. Go ahead and try her.
—David Tomaloff, author of A SOFT THAT TOUCHES DOWN & REMOVES ITSELF
