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. With an insightful introduction from John Metcalf, this revelatory selection highlights one of the most spirited and singular masters of the short story form.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland's Eye. 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.

He has been short-listed for the O. Henry Prize and Best American Essays, he won a Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction, has twice won the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, won the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize, and has been included in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories.

He has published recently in Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, Vrij Nederland, and reviews for The Globe & Mail. He 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 now teaches at the University of New Brunswick, where he is fiction editor of The Fiddlehead.

His newest collection of stories, My White Planet, was published in 2008.

Mark Anthony Jarman's profile page

Praise for Burn Man

"Anyone who enjoys poetry in prose, who feels enlivened by language and struck by sentences, will find much to admire in Burn Man. Jarman’s stories are full of violence, tragedy and mistakes. Yet there’s plenty of humor and heart too . . . Burn Man left me seeing a bit more beauty in our hurting-heart world."

—Lincoln Michel, New York Times

"A Canadian master of the form."

—Gregory Cowles, New York Times

"This country has a cornucopia of brilliant short-story writers, and Jarman is one of them. This anthology features 21 tales culled from more than four decades of exquisite writing that stretches both vocabulary and language."

—Globe and Mail, The Globe 100

"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

"One doesn’t read a Mark Anthony Jarman story so much as one experiences it . . . These 21 stories in Burn Man, selected by the author himself, are not ordered chronologically but rather the way a musician might sequence tracks on an album, paying careful attention to modulations in tempo and rhythm and how individual pieces play against one another."

—Toronto Star

"The stories in Burn Man, by the Canadian writer Mark Anthony Jarman, derive from the . . . raucous lineage of Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane and Denis Johnson . . . He gives us a gallery of antiheroes—some of them bona fide criminals but many just screwups—who are helpless in the grip of their worst impulses."

—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"In these 21 selected tales by Jarman—a Canadian writer who, if there were any literary justice, would be much better known in the US—marginalized men are on the road, on the run, failing to figure out how to stay in one place, how to stay sane, how to pin life down and make sense of it . . . Literature at the highest level: heartrending, disquieting, fascinating."

—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

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

—Winnipeg Free Press

"Mark Anthony Jarman is doing something that nobody else is doing."

—The Miramichi Reader

"Reading Mark Anthony Jarman is like drinking from a fire hose."

—Andrew Hood, The Bookshelf

"A truly revelatory selection highlights from one of the most spirited and singular contemporary masters of the short story format."

—Midwest Book Review

"The music of broken men, splintered lives, and the salted souls left behind echo through the pages."

—The Ampersand Review

"The stories here are brightly coloured, sharp-edged and shatterproof."

—Alberta Views

"A compelling and thought-provoking work."

—The Brunswickian

"Mark Anthony Jarman has written some of the most electric short fiction produced in Canada over the past four decades, and Burn Man collects the very best work from his rich and radiant archive. Peopled with crazed explorers, woeful fathers, and afflicted divorcees, this book is a cauldron of slick, dizzying sentences and images that lodge like splinters in the brain. Jarman corrodes the manors of polite literature, rearranging the rubble in tableaus of astonishing beauty. A gift to literature, Canadian and beyond."

—David Huebert, author of Chemical Valley

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

“. . . as much travelogue, novel in hiding and prose poem as it is a collection of stand-alone stories. In fact, many of the stories do not stand alone. Rather, they lean on each other, interweave and inform each other, sharing a narrator, point of view, main characters and setting.”

—Atlantic Books Today

“Jarman pulls off some ferociously good writing.”

—The Winnipeg Review

“Jarman’s prose has the momentum of travel, with vivid images and flashes of understanding about another way of life.”

—Foreword Reviews

“Jarman's collection is called 19 Knives, and it is brilliant. The writing is extraordinary, the stories are gripping, it is something new.”

—A.S. Byatt, The Guardian