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 s...

On August 22, 1922, near Macroom, County Cork, a single bullet from an unknown gunman killed Michael Collins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army. The day Collins was buried, businesses across Dublin shut down as thousands lined the streets to pay their respects. And on that day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory taking advantage of the day off, drowned quietly in Dublin's Royal Canal.In Ireland's Eye, Mark Anthony Jarman uses this confluenc...

“In this wonderful collection of essays, Mark Jarman explores with wit and passion the practice of poetry―of making it, of reading it, of living it. In his vivid analyses of works by Brooks, Boisseau, Donne, Herbert, Rukeyser and Twichell, among others, he explores how the poems and their authors negotiate time and mortality, faith and devotion. He also offers an intimate examination of his own gorgeous work and how it comes onto the page. A delight for readers and writers of poetry.”―Marg...

Mark Anthony Jarman is one of Canada’s most original and compelling writers of short fiction. My White Planet is his latest collection of fourteen new stories, many of which have previously won or been short-listed for literary magazine awards. Jarman’s use of language and metaphor is unique in the Canadian literary pantheon. With extraordinary linguistic energy, he pushes the boundaries of fiction and story-telling. Every sentence reverberates with subtle meaning and every readin...

The extraordinary "Knife Party" is from a new collection of stories by Mark Anthony Jarman titled Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, published in the spring of 2015.Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, it is also part of the six@sixty collection.

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....

“A Canadian master of the form.”—Gregory Cowles, New York TimesOne of Kirkus Reviews' 5 Collections that Short Story Fans Shouldn't MissA 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...

A pantoum about a child touching the smallpox-scarred face of an aunt; a dialogue between Jesus and Pilate in the form of a nursery rhyme; Joseph and Mary sleeping on the Sphinx's stone paw: these are some of the experiences brought before us in The Heronry.Mark Jarman is the author of ten poetry collections. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Shortlisted, New Brunswick Book Award (Non-Fiction)From acclaimed author Mark Anthony Jarman comes Touch Anywhere to Begin, his first book of travel writing since the publication of the critically acclaimed Ireland’s Eye in 2002.In 18 unusual, head-spinning essays, Jarman can drift through Venice amid the revelry of carnival and the arrival of the impending pandemic or visit a private club along Shanghai’s Huangpu River to be serenaded by ...

Winner of the The Poets' Prize (1990)Yet, these are ultimately poems of survival. Jarman explores the redemptive power of the imagination and the ways in which we transform experience into stories we tell about our lives. His characters vividly express the will to cling to existence and understand it as they pursue the meaning of family, home, identity, and love. Invented memories resurrect a forgotten past, opening doors of possibility and adding a strange richnes...

Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction AwardOne of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is "extraordinary, his stories gripping," and in this gorgeous new collection, Jarman delivers something new once again.In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, ...

Selected by editor Mark Anthony Jarman, the 2023 edition of Best Canadian Stories showcases the best Canadian fiction writing published in 2021.A collection that takes us into a firey near-future and a notorious feminist’s personal past, from a near-drowning to a fake breakdown, through mothers who fail us to crummy jobs, to thieves, to grief, to revenge with a bottle of tabasco sauce. With work by established practitioners alongside that of lesser-known w...