Smash & Grab - by Mark Anthony Jarman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"A Canadian master of the form."--Gregory Cowles, New York Times

A former military policeman, a veterinarian, and a French poet walk into a bar and debate the Vietnam war. A couple of men who are part of a commune discover two dead bodies while out sailing. An Irish woman hits a boy with her car and contemplates turning herself in. Two paramedics try to live and not burn out while dealing with so much death. A man on holiday in Venice is stalked by a pickpocket. A heartsick astronaut finds love on the moon.

In Smash & Grab Mark Anthony Jarman offers up a mischievous medley of stories that blur the lines between the real and the imagined. Continuing to chronicle the lives of the wayward and unlucky, it confirms its author as one of the most adventurous guides to the absurdity of twenty-first century existence.

Review Quotes

Praise for Smash & Grab

"Jarman is one of those writers, like Padgett Powell or Joy Williams or Barry Hannah, whose style is the work's substance, its DNA. His phrases ('We age into dinosaurs with embolisms, ' say) burst with oddity and oomph . . . Quirky, stylish, daring."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Jarman packs more into his sentences than any half dozen other authors combined . . . [Smash & Grab's] cumulative riches are plentiful and unique to one of the most invigorating and unconventional writers of short fiction around."
--Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire

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

"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

"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)

About the Author

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Burn Man, 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 is co-editor of a new literary journal CAMEL, and edited 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. Burn Man was a New York Times Editor's Choice in 2024.