Smash and Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman
Reviewed by Ian Colford
Fans of Mark Anthony Jarman’s work know what to expect. That is to say, they know to expect the unexpected.
Jarman, an award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and travel writing, writes in a raucous, kinetic mode that inundates the reader with a fire hose of sights and sounds, impressions, memories, and activities. His characters set out across landscapes bristling with emotional and physical minefields. His bracing new collection, Smash & Grab, follows this pattern.
“The Bodies” tells an amusing and disturbing tale of two men—self-sufficient, rough-and-ready types—who return home from a trip out west where they’ve procured drugs for a local commune, only to find the bodies of two unknown men on the property outside the narrator’s friend’s house. After burying the bodies at the dump, they go for a swim, then carry on with their lives, attempting to behave as if nothing unusual has happened.
The female narrator of “That Petrol Emotion,” a story set in Ireland, is suffering an agony of guilt after hitting a young man with her car. In the immediate aftermath, she stopped and was about to get out to offer help, but the young man stood and walked away with his friend. He seemed, she tells us, “right as rain.” But that was then. Later, he was rushed to the hospital, his life hanging by a thread. That’s when the story hit the news, and now the entire city of Dublin is on the lookout for the woman who was behind the wheel and callously left the accident scene. Her moral quandary: should she turn herself in?
“The Cutpurse of Venice” takes place in a contemporary version of that venerable city. The narrator and his companion, Emma, are visiting Italy post-Covid. It’s carnival season. Tourists and criminals alike are relieved to be back in action after the shutdown. The narrator spots a young man—“the pockmarked pickpocket”—plying his trade in the piazza. When it dawns on the narrator that the thief is targeting him, he recalls a long list of thieves and scammers who have victimized him and the people in his life. Livid, he picks up a brick, intending damage, but then can’t quite bring himself to take sweet revenge for these earlier losses, and then hates himself for his cowardice.
And in “The December Astronauts (Moonbase Horse Code)” the narrator has returned from a space mission during which his fellow astronaut died. The story’s speculative premise is that humans are living and working on the moon, but, like everywhere on Earth, a criminal element has infiltrated. Between missions, the narrator is working with police to stem the flow of drugs being brought by various means to the moon-based community. But along the way, the story veers into a sort of meditation, on notions of connection and belonging, as the narrator mourns a failed relationship (with Ava) while investing time in a new one (with Delia).
The fact is that Jarman’s stories often veer, and do so gleefully and unapologetically, leaving it to the reader to follow and draw sense from what’s happening. Jarman’s narrators—primarily men—are weary observers, grizzled commentators on a world lacking moral certainty that rarely gives them a break. They are candid with their thoughts, which come to us raw and unfiltered and often coloured by past instances of trauma and bad luck. And while it’s true that the verbal pyrotechnics can sometimes get in the way of the story, 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.
About the Author
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.
About the Reviewer
Ian Colford was born, raised, and educated in Halifax. His reviews and stories have appeared in many print and online publications. He is the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels, and is the recipient of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Evidence.
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis
Publication date : Feb. 24 2026
Language : English
Print length : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771966947
ISBN-13 : 978-1771966948