Tara Ison  

 

 

 

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Tara Ison Novels  
Tara Ison Short Fiction and Non Fiction  

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Recent Pubs
“Apology”
Black Clock
Fall 2007
"Cymbeline: A Man Behaving Badly and the Woman Who Loves Him"
Lincoln Center Theatre Review
Fall 2007

"Bakery Girl"
SmartSmut, Nerve.com
February 14, 2007

"Best Books...of Lists"
The Week Magazine
March 2, 2007
La Vie en Rose: Pretty in Pink”
Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes
Simon & Schuster, March 2007
“Confessions of a Former Screenwriter"
Soapbox, Publishers Weekly
April 4, 2007
“Wig”
Getting Even; Women’s Tales of Revenge
Serpent’s Tail Press, fall 2007
“Are You Somebody?” (excerpt)
The Week Magazine
October 2006
 
 
 

 

 
Chapter  

TinHouse
"List Item #10 — The Motel Room "

Excerpt from The List
Winter 2007

"She shifts her weight, she's sweating, so he hears her skin peel off plastic, and he's thinking about lurid hearts, slick flesh on full, exposed view, getting that deep, and he suddenly sees the revealed, deep inside of her...."

[Excerpt]


"A Heart, Beating"

Excerpt from The List
Spring 2007

"He took her hand, kissed her little finger. Sweet, he said. Then he bit until the finger pad went white and strained. It was some kind of victory, that he still cared enough to want to cause her pain...."

[Excerpt]

Another City
"Cactus"

2003

...One by one he pulled the spines out with pliers.  My leg bristled and I shivered at the fierce, tiny burns...each spine barb tugged with it a small divot of flesh, a brief welling of blood, and with each tug I thought Why didn't he warn me?

[Full Text]

Beastial Noise
"Ball"

2003

...When I awoke in the morning her brown nose was breathing in my face and her almond-shaped blue eyes blinked at me with drowsy adoration, and I was abruptly slapped swollen with love....

[Full Text]

Tin House
"First Erotic Lit..."

I discovered my parents' porn stash when I was around nine or ten, home sick from school, queasy, mildly feverish, forlorn, achy, and itching to discover something....

[Full Text]

TinHouse
"La Vie en Rose — Pretty In Pink "

"It's 1986. The Challenger has exploded, and Chernobyl is about to burn. U.S. air strikes againts Libya loom, and a terrorist bomb will blow up a TWA plane. U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop will want children taught about anal sex as a defense against AIDS. A toxic gas eruption will float a lethal cloud over Cameroon. I am abruptly 22 years old, and everywhere I turn: radiation, lies, viruses, a shower of burning debris.... I will spend a lot of this year at the movies...."
Amazon Link

Kenyon Review
"The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent..."

Fall 2001

...Of course, not drawing from our lives, not writing the "real" life story that draws blood, that pains us, is often what keeps it safe.  The writing and the life....  But how much, as a writer, am I willing to pay for my work?  How much am I willing to earn?

[Excerpt]

Black Clock

 

Are You Somebody?
"Are You Somebody?"

2006

...I live in Los Angeles, so I live by the same rule all my single girlfriends do: Don’t date an actor. We respect the stereotype. Actors are self-involved, self-obsessed. Actors are superficial. Actors are fucked-up. Actors are trouble. An actor is a guy, Marlon Brando once said, who if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening. Ask an actor a question, he’ll tell you his credits, as Neil Simon says. “Even Laurence Olivier is probably vain and self-centered,” Mia Farrow says in Rosemary’s Baby, complaining about her actor-husband, who, as we soon learn, is not only vain and self-centered, but, in a career-advancing move, is actually in league with Satan himself.

[Full Text]

Lost On Purpose
"Timing"

Spring 2005

... I smiled indulgently, everyone at our high school did, then, at Chas’ panting, socialist need to Do Something, at his angelic blond curls and beige corduroy slacks. I would have shunned a crush with cruel and condescending sweetness. I would have dismissed him, thoroughly. I have now made the mistake of layering that memory onto this present man, reencountered five weeks ago in a bar I thought him too unhip for, and have wound up here, naked in bed with someone who is no longer who he was. Who now calls himself Chuck. Who has, in sneaking a new self past me, into me, lied....

 
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