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.

With characters ranging from desperate to wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's "19 Knives" employs virtuosic wordplay and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. But Jarman doesn't just write about people; he enables readers to enter his characters' frailty and courage. His vivid wordplay evokes with equal verve the tragedy of "Burn Man," who refers to himself in the third person in order to inhabit his disfigured body; and the cutting comedy of a delusional narrator who sees Margaret Atwood in some hilariously unlikely guises.