Knife Party at the Hotel Europa
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Goose Lane Editions
Published:25th Apr '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
One of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is "extraordinary, his stories gripping," and in this gorgeous new collection, Jarman delivers something new once again.
In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, Jarman writes about losing and finding love, marriage and melancholy, the dislocation and redemptive power of travel in Italy's sensual summer.
A man travels to Italy to escape the memory of love lost, and a marriage ended. He passes through sun-drenched landscapes of cliffs and seaside paradises, while the corpses of refugees wash up on the beach; he parties with the young and beautiful Italians he meets on the train while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. A teenage thief prowls the roof of the tourist hotel at night; an embassy is bombed; holy statues come alive to roam in a gang stealing used restaurant grease.
He suffers the acute loneliness of one who has abandoned and been abandoned, and in this exquisite suffering, he finds how beautiful this life can be. In vivid, sensuous prose, Jarman's stories circle and overlap in surprising, weird, and wonderful ways. Tangents turn out to be crucial, allusions are powerful.
"Mark Anthony Jarman's Knife Party at the Hotel Europa is an incendiary performance by a master storyteller. His prose is pyrotechnic bliss, the epitome of cool — adroit, eloquent, witty, hallucinatory, and sexy. He sets his stories in Rome, the blast zone of contemporary Europe, a glittering polyglot echo chamber of voices, packed with gypsies, druggies, expats, refugees, and tourists — something like A Room with a View meets Naked Lunch." -- Douglas Glover, author of Savage Love
"In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, love gone awry collides with Italy. From the warm, embracing glow of Rome's walls to a beach party on the wrong side of a military base, a broken heart is no match for Jarman's prose, which flies from all sides like jets in a dogfight, riotous and stunningly talented." -- Eden Robinson, author of Monkey Beach and Blood Sports
"This is the work of a short-story master in full control of his work: tone, voice, audience are all in hand. These stories are very much like musical variations on a theme. What if the violin line leads? What changes when the oboe takes charge? The answer? Everything. Bittersweet and beautiful. Knife Party at the Hotel Europa is a jewel of a collection. If it doesn't change you, your heart is too hard." -- Russell Wangersky, author of Walt
"Nothing, no description, no summary can prepare you for the book itself. ... Knife Party at Hotel Europa is fierce and beautiful, one of the most stunning books I’ve read in a long time." -- Robert J. Wiersema * Vancouver Sun *
ISBN: 9780864929150
Dimensions: 203mm x 127mm x 15mm
Weight: 288g
288 pages
Paperback