“J. A. Tyler is producing some of the most challenging, distinct, and provocative works of modern fiction.”
— HuffPost
A mother clings to twin sons, desperate to keep them from becoming their father, a pirate forever sailing away. In this rain-soaked township, she will attempt to mummify them, piece by piece, to stop them from growing up, a hope founded in magic and immortality. Meanwhile, their father obsesses the seas with his own belief in ever-lasting life, learning too late that his heart belongs on shore. In Only and Ever This, a family must endure father loss, a mother’s grief, and roiling adolescence, slipping as it does into arcades, caves, and the young love for a ghostly girl up the street.
“J.A. Tyler’s Only and Ever This is a rollicking adventure about brotherhood and family, marriage and grief, childhood and piracy—perfect for fans of Peter Markus and Justin Torres and Stranger Things and Treasure Island. (As everyone should be.) This book hums with the sincerity of all true quests: don’t hesitate to answer its call.” —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
“A moving, lyrical cyclone of a book. This is a novel of bodies and families, ghosts and doubles, failures of presence and absence. I lingered on every page, until reminded of the miracle that even more waited ahead, underneath, around, within.” —Jac Jemc, author of Empty Theatre and The Grip of It
“On the surface it’s a sea tale, but deeper it’s something else. A fantasy mother who mummifies her children, a fantasy father always at sea, and a feast of other oddities. It’s a masterfully-written book that will make you think more than twice about everything.” —David Ohle, author of Motorman
“For years now, J. A. Tyler has been writing fiction that blends surreal settings with stunningly-composed sentences.”
— Tor.com
In The Zoo, a Going, the commonplace act of a family visiting the zoo becomes a window through which a child contemplates the breakdown of relationships, the loss of a brother he never knew, and the struggle of a father back from an incomprehensible war. As they travel from cage to cage, Jonah sees himself and his mother and father through the lens of the animals, hovering on the terrible edge of adulthood. At once prose and poetry, The Zoo, a Going tackles the complexities of growing up, of maturing. It is a novel about the power of words, both those uttered and those left unsaid.
“In J. A. Tyler’s hands, static concepts become Möbius strips of subversion. This incredible text is a kaleidoscopic set of bifocals: look up and you’re in a faraway war, down and you’re in a suburban treehouse. Up and you’re the victim, down and you’re the aggressor. What is so important throughout—what Tyler so remarkably and irrefutably convinces the reader of—is all the ways these binaries are indeed, are inescapably, fused together on the same lens.” — Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa
“Through J. A. Tyler's zoo, we see all sorts of animals, humans and otherwise, exposing their true nature. This is a wise and naked examination of the various incarcerations of family life.” — Joshua Mohr, author of Sirens
“The Zoo, a Going is a sudden book…you don’t want to miss it.”
— Ken Sparling, author of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall
“J. A. Tyler’s ability to wordsmith is incomparable, not only in form and function but in style and flow. He harbors an elaborate writing style all his own, and leaves his essence in every line.”
The Nervous Breakdown
“J. A. Tyler is coming at fiction in a different way. He’s taking conventions and exploding them in order to dissect and understand them and then discuss them, all while telling a story.”
The Ampersand Review
“It reads like a novel, or like a series of prose poems, or as a book-length prose poem. And like any good dream-narrative, it is often shifting us from one dream-space to another, dreams within dreams.”
Necessary Fiction
“J. A. Tyler pursues his vision with stamina and acuity: A dead-eye.”
— Joyelle McSweeney, author of Percussion Grenade
“This extraordinary piece of art combines the writerly with the painterly, harnessing the energy of a natural formal conflict and resolving it toward a common purpose, a story in which to lose ourselves.”
The Lit Pub
“This is like a Miranda July film, this is like a circle, this makes you think about words: Individual words. It makes you say them out loud until they don’t mean what you thought they meant.”
Book Punch
“I felt as if my face was pressed right up against someone else’s, so close that our lips almost touched. It’s impressive to create such a sense of violence and claustrophobia so quickly.”
Pank
“Like Stein, like Beckett, J. A. Tyler is a sentence-maker that makes a world out of the sentence.”
— Peter Markus, author of Inside My Pencil