Tara Ison

"Ball explores the darker edges of love and sex and death with complex, vivid stories set mostly in contemporary Los Angeles."--Page 4 of cover.

Stories

Ball

Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies looks at how film shapes identity. Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love. Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style. Rather than being a means of escape or object of mere entertainment, Ison posits that cinema is a more engaging form of art, a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realities. A way to orient oneself into the world. Reeling Though Life is a compelling look at one popular art form and how it has influenced our identities in provocative and important ways.

How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Reeling Through Life

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is the story of a twelve-year-old Parisian Jewish girl in World War II France, living "in hiding" as a Catholic orphan with a family in a small village. When Danielle Marton's father is killed during the early days of the German Occupation, her mother sends her to live in a quiet farming town near Limoges in Vichy France. Now called Marie-Jean Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the truth of what's happened to her family and her country with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she's bitter about being left behind by her mother, and horrified at having to milk the cow and memorize Catholic prayers for church. But as the years pass and the Occupation worsens, Danielle finds it easier to suppress her former life entirely, and Marie-Jean becomes less and less of an act. By the time she's fifteen and there is talk amongst the now divided town of an Allied invasion, not only has Danielle lost the memories of her father's face and the smell of her mother's perfume, but her very self, transforming into a strict Catholic, a fervent disciple of fascism, as well as a German collaborator. At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a hauntingly beautiful novel about identity, and how a vulnerable mind can be tragically reshaped under the influence of extremist ideologies.

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf

Ball is the thrilling and emotionally provocative debut collection of short fiction by the acclaimed author of the novels Rockaway and A Child Out of Alcatraz and the essay collection Reeling through Life. Ball explores the darker edges of love and sex and death, how they are intimately and often violently connected, with bright, vivid stories set mostly in contemporary Los Angeles. In “Cactus,” a young girl comes 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; in “Fish,” the narrator sits watch over a dying uncle, trying to pay for past sins while administering to his final needs, but distracted by the ravenous fish in the Koi pond near the hospital; and in the collection’s stunning title story, the bonds of friendship and pet ownership collide in the most startling and unexpected ways. With a keen insight into the edges of human behavior and an assured literary hand, Ball is the new book by one of the West’s most provocative stylists.

The bold new novel by Tara Ison is a haunting story about identity, how a vulnerable mind can be shaped and warped, and how that psychological trajectory can happen under the influence of extremist ideologies and the trauma of war. Young Danielle is ripped from her life in Paris after the German Occupation and the violent loss of her father. Her mother flees underground, leaving Danielle to the care of a Catholic family in the remote village of La Perrine. She is reborn as Marie-Jeanne, the niece of kindly Berthe and Claude and cousin to their angry son Luc, who resents her presence as a threat to his family’s safety. As the Vichy government's collaboration with Germany increases, Danielle faces a series of events that will change her forever: the discovery that her new friend, too, is Jewish; that her cousin might be involved in la Resistance; and that the affections of a friendly Vichy official might contain intentions more diabolical than she ever thought possible. Ultimately she must discover: Is she Danielle or Marie-Jeanne? Who can she trust, the father she cannot remember, the mother who abandoned her, the fake family she relies upon, or the seductive fervor of a passionate war all around her? Which person will win out? Ison’s intricate, explosive novel presents a fascinating look at identity during a time of great instability and violence.

Searing, and yet enormously compelling, this stinging portrait of the downward spiral of a mother and young daughter will haunt the reader's days and dreams. Olivia grows up in a neighborhood like most others--except it is on the island of Alcatraz, where there is no escape.

A Child Out of Alcatraz

“How tragic that this book--set in a Queens, New York, beach town that in real life was devastated by Sandy--has a new relevance. Sarah is a California painter who’s come east for a retreat she hopes will revive her artistic passion. It’s a sheer joy to stay in the company of Ison’s voice. There’s an unlikely relationship at the center, the kind of encounter that could happen only in the summertime suspension of ‘ordinary’ life.” --Karen Russell, O Magazine Rockaway Beach, 2001. Sarah, a painter from southern California, retreats to this eccentric, eclectic beach town in the far reaches of Queens with the hopes of rediscovering her passion for painting. Sarah has the opportunity for a real gallery showing if only she can create some new and interesting work. There, near the beach, she hopes to escape a life caught in the stasis of caregiving for her elderly parents and working at an art supply store to unleash the artist within. One summer, a room filled with empty canvasses, nothing but possibility. There she meets Marty, an older musician from a once-popular band whose harmonies still infuse the summertime music festivals. His strict adherence to his music and to his Jewish faith will provoke unexpected feelings in Sarah and influence both her time there and her painting. Rockaway is a time capsule love letter to a quirky, singular town, in a time before an entire community was brought to its knees in the events about to occur in September 2001, and to an entire town that faced tragedy again when it was summarily devastated eleven years later by Hurricane Sandy.

A Novel

Rockaway

Anthony Doerr

Milan Kundera

Jim Shepard

Anthony Swofford

Stuart Dybek

Ron Carlson

Charlie Smith

The literary magazine people are talking about

Tin House

Patrick O'Neil

Steve Heller

Wendy C. Ortiz

Yuvi Zalkow

Daniel José Older

Susan Southard

Elizabeth Earley

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Bernadette Murphy

Laraine Herring

Jillian Lauren

Naomi Benaron

Joan Dempsey

Noriko Nakada

Alistair McCartney

Gayle Brandeis

Michael Passafiume

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

Dawna Kemper

Wendy Hudson

Rochelle Newman

Gordon Lee Johnson

F. Douglas Brown

Anna Scotti

Antoinette Brim

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Valentina Gnup

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Steve De Jarnatt

Lauren Schmidt

Topper Lilien

Lisbeth Andriessen

Deborah Bauer

Antonia Crane

Tammy Delatorre

Jacqueline Heinze

LaToya Jordan

Hazel Kight Witham

David Bumpus

Raymond Gaston

Katelyn Keating

Lise Quintana

Arielle Silver

Wendy Dutwin

Seth Fischer

Michael Leal García

Khadija Anderson

Angela Brommel

M. L. Brown

Joe Jiménez

Tanya Ko Hong

Shelly Krehbiel

Gina Loring

Allie Marini

Maiana Minahal

Jim Natal

Daniel G. Reinhold

Chrys Tobey

Reyan Grande

2017 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. We commemorated this occasion with a special edition of our journal. Lunch Ticket Special: Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch¿s MFA in Creative Writing features new and previously published works by Antioch MFA alumni.

Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch's MFA in Creative Writing

Lunch Ticket Special

The List is an irreverent, sophisticated take on the classic breakup story. In fierce and exquisite prose, Tara Ison has written an astonishing story of love and hate. Isabel is finishing medical school and destined to become a brilliant heart surgeon. Al is a video store clerk, a one-hit-wonder director whose first and only film became a cult classic. Their electric, passionate, and deeply maddening relationship can't possibly work. Tired of endlessly coming together and breaking up, they make a list of ten things to do before they finally say good-bye. But after a few perfect dates the list takes a dark turn, and their plan spirals out of control as they realize they would rather destroy each other than let go.

The List

JJ Johnson

About

Books

Join the club