From the author of 19 Knives and My White Planet comes a brilliant suite of stories built around music and travel. Whether it's a band coming apart at the ruins of Pompeii, or tours through Napoli's "volcanic dust and volcanic drugs and jackal-headed bedlam and mountains of stinking trash"; or a nostalgic stroll past the homeless in Victoria's inner harbour while "gentle Tunisian techno" rides the breeze, where the addicted populate park benches, as weighted as Shakespearean characters ... "lit rock and tiny chalice hidden under his shirt, get it all, draw every wisp of the wreath and heavy is the head that wears the crown, that lights the lighter." Or it's Steppenwolf or The Youngbloods drifting from a car radio as "an ambulance siren and lights fly our street ... a flashing mime show of grief's rocket." Or, perhaps they're in Iceland, or Denmark, "somewhere seriously lunar and attractive" spending wheelbarrows of cash the record execs didn't give them. Or it's the Viper Room, Sunset Boulevard, a bar in Butte, Montana, or Johnny Cash in Tijuana.

The five stories that comprise Czech Techno are replete with the sizzle and jump we have come to expect in a Mark Jarman story - "those shadowbox anthems of lost icy street corners and vanished republics" are on grand display, his herky-jerky emblematic style in full roar. And the quest for love, the matters of the heart, is ever-present, weaving through these stories like a knife blade through sand.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of 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. His novel, Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey fiction.

He won a Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction, has twice won the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, won the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize, was shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, the Alistair MacLeod Prize, the Thomas Raddall Prize, was included in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories, and short-listed for Best American Essays and the O. Henry Award.

He has published in the Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Hobart, the Barcelona Review, Vrij Nederland, and reviews for the Globe and 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 literary journal.

Mark Jarman's profile page