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.