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)

"Canadian author Jarman’s stories are just the thing for readers seeking a sharp, voicey narrative."

—Laurie Muchnick, Kirkus Reviews' '5 Collections that Short Story Fans Shouldn't Miss'

"With Smash & Grab, Jarman gathers disparate threads, memories, and digressions into something greater than the sum of its parts. As much as the outside world may disturb, in these pages, readers will find a rich inner life on full display."

—Sam White, Literary Review of Canada

"One senses that Jarman’s writing is handmade, like delicate items in some rare boutique shop that is only open one day a week . . . His new collection, Smash & Grab, is filled with vertiginous, telegrammatic writing, and his heroes, misfits, outcasts, and seers are shot through with a romantic longing and an earthbound fallenness; they reside among beer-sodden floorboards, they discern and actively seek out the stars, but are poignantly aware of their own mortality."

—Baret Magarian, World Literature Today

"In his new powerful collection of short stories, Jarman continues his mastery of the form, with seemingly no limits to his fervid imagination . . . All 14 stories show Jarman brilliantly and seamlessly tackling any genre, from memoir to offbeat sci-fi to manic surrealism."

—Rory Runnells, Winnipeg Free Press

"In Smash & Grab, Mark Anthony Jarman continues to render a world flush with hazard where anything can happen, doing it in his own singularly beguiling and entertaining fashion."

—Ian Colford, Seaboard Review

"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

"You may be caught in the middle of a Jarman story wondering what exactly is going on, but you will never be caught in the middle of a Jarman story bored. Jarman’s language here, as always, is pyrotechnic."

—Michael Bryson, Miramichi Reader

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

Praise for Burn Man

"Jarman’s stories on the whole feel less Catholic in the Roman sense and more Catholic in the Greek sense: his attentions are rangey, all-embracing, vitalized by the splendour both in ugly mundane violence and the febrile pulsations of longing, of something a bit like love."

—Emily M. Keeler, Globe and Mail

"Reading Jarman is a wild ride . . . Jarman is brilliant, still relatively underdiscovered and worth the wait."

—Winnipeg Free Press