Yuriy Tarnawsky

Written in an internal monologue style, driven by incessant denial of what has been said he developed in his 2011 story "Father," Yuriy Tarnawsky's The First-Person Dilogy mixes autobiographical data with fiction, to create a powerful, two-part music-like composition of syntax and semantics. The first novel, Sebastian in a Dream, was inspired by Georg Trakl's famous eponymous poem and is patterned on J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations, consisting of thirty variations, preceded and followed by the same aria, and deals with a semi-comatose man expecting the arrival of his real or imaginary son. Its companion, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which is based on El Greco's masterpiece, also consists of thirty variations that roughly correspond to the thirty figures in the painting, describes a man who has come to die in the Spanish city of Toledo and visits each day the church in which the painting is housed, in order to see it.

Written in an internal monologue style, driven by incessant denial of what has been said he developed in his 2011 story "Father," Yuriy Tarnawsky's The First-Person Dilogy mixes autobiographical data with fiction, to create a powerful, two-part music-like composition of syntax and semantics. The first novel, Sebastian in a Dream, was inspired by Georg Trakl's famous eponymous poem and is patterned on J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations, consisting of thirty variations, preceded and followed by the same aria, and deals with a semi-comatose man expecting the arrival of his real or imaginary son. Its companion, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which is based on El Greco's masterpiece, also consists of thirty variations that roughly correspond to the thirty figures in the painting, describes a man who has come to die in the Spanish city of Toledo and visits each day the church in which the painting is housed, in order to see it.

Fiction. In a new, expanded edition Female barbers attached to a pair of scissors that won't stop, women who can't conceal hard-earned wads of hundred dollar bills sticking up under their polka dot bikini bottoms, adulteresses who bludgeon their husbands to bloody deaths, Dostoyevskian prostitute virgins, compulsive seductresses who delight in torturing tall wimpy men, all shown in a blinding bright light on an absurdist stage. Are crocodiles capable of smiling if they can't cry? You'll find the answer in this dazzling new collection of absurdist "short shrift fictions" by the author of THE PLACEBO EFFECT TRILOGY."In case you have missed the voice of the rich, courageous, adventurous fiction writing of Yuriy Tarnawsky, this collection will be a great introduction. You will experience his unique ability to meld wicked humor and looming gravitas.One of the great under-recognized talents in the fiction of the 20th-21st century."-Steve Katz"If Frankenstein had had the wit of Groucho Marx and the subtle plasticity of Magritte he might have written these magical and dangerous stories instead of Yuriy Tarnawsky. The master of short tails has struck again Frightening, funny and baffling as ever "-Alain Arias-Misson"Yuriy Tarnawsky's fictional world is one in which every object and every action is meaningful. Haircuts have meaning. Two refrigerators are alive with ominous activity. Kafka meets Sartre (implying hell is... other bugs ). Sweet porridge can 'assuage the victim's suffering.' The stories are perfectly envisioned, as if Tarnawsky had just landed on this earth with his sense of wonder still intact, looking at everything and trying to understand. Reading these stories is like learning to see all over again "-Eckhard Gerdes

Fiction. A woman possessed by an inexplicable hatred for her husband plans his death on their forthcoming trip to Mexico. It is unwittingly facilitated by a young girl with whom the husband falls in love.THE IGUANAS OF HEAT is an altogether different book, even as it remains unmistakably a novel by Yuriy Tarnawsky. Recalling at times the works of John O'Hara, John Hawkes, Paul and Jane Bowles, as well as Ann Quin, it tells the story of an extremely unhappily married couple, Greta Kraus and Walter Kramer...Lyrical, emotional, and compulsively readable, WARM ARCTIC NIGHTS and THE IGUANAS OF HEAT make remarkable additions to what was already a powerful body of work. Both are heartily recommended."--A.D. Jameson

Fiction. Driven by an unquenchable thirst for the unknown and boundless imagination, a boy learns about the nature of life in an idyllic pre-WW II Poland and nightmarish WW II Ukraine. Life in Yuriy Tarnawsky's latest novel is shown to have the warmth and beauty of the eternal arctic night."By turns reminiscent of Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Kosinsky's The Painted Bird, Yuriy Tarnawsky's WARM ARCTIC NIGHTS is a swift and deeply engrossing fictive memoir of an idyllic childhood whose martial and masculine tenets presage an onslaught of inhumanity and fear. Steeped in subtle irony and the surreal, it is also a sui generis act of remembrance, memorial, and love."--Michael Mejia"For those unfamiliar with Tarnawsky's work, WARM ARCTIC NIGHTS makes a perfect place to start--especially now, when debates over fascism and refugees are sadly once again at the forefront of the news...Lyrical, emotional, and compulsively readable, WARM ARCTIC NIGHTS and THE IGUANAS OF HEAT make remarkable additions to what was already a powerful body of work. Both are heartily recommended."--A.D. Jameson

Struggling with your iambs and pentameters? Characters and plots? Have you hit the concrete wall of a writer's block? Or are you having the time of your life seeing your pen trace out graceful meanders of words on the blank pages before you or your fleet fingers make letters dutifully jump off the keyboard of your laptop onto the screen above it? Whichever is the case, you must try these 100 exercises the artist and educator in Yuriy Tarnawsky have conjured up for you. What the gentle stretching on the yoga mat does for your muscles and joints, these painful tasks will do for the writing talents inside you. You may return to them again, and again, and again.

In these five surrealist collages, waking life continually gives way before the onslaught of dreams. Yuriy Tarnawsky has condensed the vastness of scope typical of novels into shorter fragments - mininovels - that require the reader's active participation. The tone is a balance of dead-pan comedy and solemn gothic, sometimes a near-parody of wide-eyed candor, sometimes recounting utterly mad or barely conceivable states of affairs. A candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it. Two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy. A pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard. A character sees the giant blue and white flowers he has craved his whole life only at the instance of his electrocution. Tyler Pavarotti, a tailor, voluntarily takes a role in a production in which he will be killed. Tarnawsky's language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Both tragic and beautiful, in these stories life dissolves in time like blood in water.