Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim - by Jacob Wren (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the 2024 Quebec Writers Federation Fiction Award

Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

Finalist for the 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren't your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.

A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it's a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that's being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life--from this reimagined society and elsewhere--underscore truths hidden in plain sight.

In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

Review Quotes

"Worth a look and some thoughtful examination." --rabble

"A stunning thought experiment where our hypocrisy, culpability, and compassion are all exposed, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a thought-provoking work of secular expiation, a knowing knot of courage and its opposite, and a defiant work of desperate grace."--Eugene Lim, author of Search History

"By turns a revolutionary's memoir, an adventurer's journal, autofiction, and speculative fiction, yet Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim always stays clear and committed to its searching style, and this makes it a novel for today's uncertain world."--Kaie Kellough, author of Dominoes at the Crossroads

"Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a perfectly positioned novel for the current historical moment. I only hope that we can all read it and grapple, together." --The Miramichi Reader

"A stunning thought experiment where our hypocrisy, culpability, and compassion are all exposed, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a thought-provoking work of secular expiation, a knowing knot of courage and its opposite, and a defiant work of desperate grace." --Eugene Lim, author of Search History

"By turns a revolutionary's memoir, an adventurer's journal, autofiction, and speculative fiction, yet Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim always stays clear and committed to its searching style, and this makes it a novel for today's uncertain world." --Kaie Kellough, author of Dominoes at the Crossroads

About the Author

JACOB WREN makes literature, performances, and exhibitions. His books include Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed; Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and a Globe and Mail best book of 2014); Rich and Poor (finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a Globe and Mail best book of 2016); and Authenticity is a Feeling. He is artistic co-director of the Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART. Wren lives in Montreal.