19 Knives
CBC Books | Posted: August 16, 2018 7:47 PM | Last Updated: August 16, 2018
Mark Anthony Jarman
With characters ranging from the desperate to the obsessive to the wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives employs dazzling linguistic verve and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. But Jarman doesn't just write about people, he puts us in their skin so that we feel their frailty and courage. No other contemporary Canadian short story writer slices up the imaginative excitement, cultural hybridity and Joycean play of language we see in 19 Knives. With one of the stories shortlisted for the U.S.'s prestigious O. Henry Prize and several others having won prizes or been published in magazines and journals across North America, this collection brings a major fiction writer to the fore. (From House of Anansi)
From the book
Fall from the Greyhound and my town seems so tiny: Smaller the cage, meaner the rat, allows my best friend John Stark Lee. All the stores have false wooden fronts pushed into each other on just one side of the street, a sandy road glowing under the walls and along the riverbank, and my bus idling under the single row of goldrush buildings with their gingerbread decks and narrow doors and sash windows and minarets facing the violent river like a frail resolute audience.
From 19 Knives by Mark Anthony Jarman ©2000. Published by House of Anansi.