Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman

Douglas Glover begins his essay “How to Read a Mark Anthony Jarman Short Story” from Attack of the Copula Spiders (2012) with precision: “Though often rising out of situations that are violent or bizarre or both, Mark Jarman’s story lines tend to be minimal, just enough plausible action to jump-start the engine of his verbal inventiveness.”

As readers open Jarman’s latest collection, Smash & Grab, it would be useful to keep Glover’s insight in mind. 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.

The plots in Smash & Grab’s 14 stories continue the approach described by Glover also. They are often framed by violence or the bizarre or both. In the opening story, “Bodies,” two young men smuggle drugs from the United States into British Columbia. When they return to their rural home, they find the bodies of two dead men lying in the “daisies and ragweed.” They decide only one thing can be done. Take the bodies to the dump and bury them in the garbage.

These are characters, clearly, under pressure and making bad decisions. They are also living a heightened reality, floating not just on violence and crime, but also rich waves of language, and Jarman brings readers along for the ride. But the resolution here will not be found in the question, what happens? Jarman’s stories, Glover says, reveal their meaning instead “mysteriously in the play of language itself.”

They are also living a heightened reality, floating not just on violence and crime, but also rich waves of language, and Jarman brings readers along for the ride.

The second story in the collection, “That Petrol Emotion,” is also framed by an act of violence, though this time an accidental one. Set in Dublin, Ireland, the story begins with a series of images preceding the moment a car clips a boy who’d stepped into the street: “Swans sail the canal as my car speeds the stone bridge, swans in the mirror while I zip around a lorry stopped at a shop, its flashers blinking robotically.”

The boy rises, seems okay, the driver carries on, but later it’s all over the news. How could she just drive away leaving the scene? But this is a plot question and not how Jarman’s stories operate. Instead, the story careens inside the mind of the driver, full of life’s wildness.

“His narratives are monologues, speeches,” Glover says of Jarman’s stories, tracing traces Jarman’s linguistic playfulness backwards through James Joyce and the Elizabethans to the “ancient tradition of eloquent speaking much despised, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, by Plato, the logician, who saw no place of poets in his republic.”

Jarman has written a nonfiction book, Ireland’s Eye (2003), about travels in Ireland and his family’s connections there. His narratives and plentiful voices arise from leprechauns, and they can make demands of readers that requires, on occasion, a little magic. One such tale might be a story later in the collection, “The December Astronauts,” which takes the metaphorical leprechauns to outer space, where an astronaut sings songs of heartbreak amid zero gravity.

I don’t want to suggest the Jarman’s stories need a reading key (e.g., Glover’s interpretive tools), but the tools remind us that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Err, there’s more than one way to write a story – and many ways to read them.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Burn Man, Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. He is co-editor of a new literary journal CAMEL, and edited Best Canadian Stories 2023. His novel Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey ﬁction. Widely published in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia, Jarman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of New Brunswick. Burn Man was a New York Times Editor’s Choice in 2024.

Publisher: Biblioasis (February 24, 2026)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 224 pages
ISBN: 9781771966948

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.