About this item
Highlights
- A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024"Literature at the highest level: heartrending, disquieting, fascinating.
- About the Author: Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland's Eye.
- 320 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Short Stories (single author)
- Series Name: Reset
Description
About the Book
"The best collected short fiction of Mark Anthony Jarman published over the last four decades."--Book Synopsis
A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024
"Literature at the highest level: heartrending, disquieting, fascinating."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Drawing together the best of his short fiction published over the last four decades, Burn Man: Selected Stories showcases Mark Anthony Jarman's sharply observed characters and acrobatic, voice-driven prose in stories that walk the tightrope between the commonplace and the mystical. With an insightful introduction from John Metcalf, this revelatory selection highlights one of the most spirited and singular masters of the short story form.
Review Quotes
Praise for Burn Man
"Anyone who enjoys poetry in prose, who feels enlivened by language and struck by sentences, will find much to admire in Burn Man. Jarman's stories are full of violence, tragedy and mistakes. Yet there's plenty of humor and heart too . . . Burn Man left me seeing a bit more beauty in our hurting-heart world."
-Lincoln Michel, New York Times
"A Canadian master of the form."
--Gregory Cowles, New York Times
"The stories in Burn Man, by the Canadian writer Mark Anthony Jarman, derive from the . . . raucous lineage of Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane and Denis Johnson . . . He gives us a gallery of antiheroes--some of them bona fide criminals but many just screwups--who are helpless in the grip of their worst impulses."
--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"This country has a cornucopia of brilliant short-story writers, and Jarman is one of them. This anthology features 21 tales culled from more than four decades of exquisite writing that stretches both vocabulary and language."
--Globe and Mail, The Globe 100
"Jarman's stories on the whole feel less Catholic in the Roman sense and more Catholic in the Greek sense: his attentions are rangey, all-embracing, vitalized by the splendour both in ugly mundane violence and the febrile pulsations of longing, of something a bit like love."
--Emily M. Keeler, Globe and Mail
"In these 21 selected tales by Jarman--a Canadian writer who, if there were any literary justice, would be much better known in the US--marginalized men are on the road, on the run, failing to figure out how to stay in one place, how to stay sane, how to pin life down and make sense of it . . . Literature at the highest level: heartrending, disquieting, fascinating."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"One doesn't read a Mark Anthony Jarman story so much as one experiences it . . . These 21 stories in Burn Man, selected by the author himself, are not ordered chronologically but rather the way a musician might sequence tracks on an album, paying careful attention to modulations in tempo and rhythm and how individual pieces play against one another."
--Toronto Star
"Reading Jarman is a wild ride . . . Jarman is brilliant, still relatively underdiscovered and worth the wait."
--Winnipeg Free Press
"Mark Anthony Jarman is doing something that nobody else is doing."
--The Miramichi Reader
"Reading Mark Anthony Jarman is like drinking from a fire hose."
--Andrew Hood, The Bookshelf
"A truly revelatory selection highlights from one of the most spirited and singular contemporary masters of the short story format."
--Midwest Book Review
"The music of broken men, splintered lives, and the salted souls left behind echo through the pages."
--The Ampersand Review
"The stories here are brightly coloured, sharp-edged and shatterproof."
--Alberta Views
"A compelling and thought-provoking work."
--The Brunswickian
"Mark Anthony Jarman has written some of the most electric short fiction produced in Canada over the past four decades, and Burn Man collects the very best work from his rich and radiant archive. Peopled with crazed explorers, woeful fathers, and
About the Author
Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland's Eye. He was an acquisitions editor for Oberon Press, and introduced many new writers through the Coming Attractions series. He is also the editor of Best Canadian Stories 2023. His novel Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca's list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon's list of best hockey fiction. Widely published in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia, Jarman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of New Brunswick, where he has been fiction editor of The Fiddlehead literary journal since 1999. He is also co-editor of literary journal CAMEL.