Praise for Burn Man
"In these 21 selected tales by Jarman—a Canadian writer who, if there were any literary justice, would be much better known in the U.S.—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)
"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
"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 afflicted divorcees, this book is a cauldron of slick, dizzying sentences and images that lodge like splinters in the brain. Jarman corrodes the manors of polite literature, rearranging the rubble in tableaus of astonishing beauty. A gift to literature, Canadian and beyond."
—David Huebert, author of Chemical Valley
Praise for Mark Anthony Jarman
“One of Canada's most accomplished prose stylists, with an affection for jazzy rhythms and oblique angles ... the writing will be familiar to aficionados of the author's earlier work—the trilling sentences, the insouciant alliteration and assonance, the rococo metaphors, the sudden shifts in tone from light to dark, humour to startling violence.”
—Globe and Mail
“Jarman's descriptions of Italy's managed chaos of ruins and tourist traps and crowded cities are witty, evocative and, when he turns his attention to the displaced peoples from Africa, the Middle East and the Baltic states living rough in the dirty streets, often quite moving.”
—Toronto Star
“... as much travelogue, novel in hiding and prose poem as it is a collection of stand-alone stories. In fact, many of the stories do not stand alone. Rather, they lean on each other, interweave and inform each other, sharing a narrator, point of view, main characters and setting.”
—Atlantic Books Today
“Jarman pulls off some ferociously good writing.”
—The Winnipeg Review
“Jarman’s prose has the momentum of travel, with vivid images and flashes of understanding about another way of life.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Jarman's collection is called 19 Knives, and it is brilliant. The writing is extraordinary, the stories are gripping, it is something new.”
—A.S. Byatt, The Guardian
