Fiction Pick, Broken Pencil Magazine

Suburban Pornography is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped--minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems--people stuck in bad relationships or jobs. Some yearn for something just beyond their grasp, something authentic to knock them out of their malaise. Their frailties and obsessions are front and centre. They are garbage men, bus drivers, waitresses, soup kitchen clients, and neighbourhood perverts--tired and busy, too weary to contemplate--from social conditions that sanction only mere existence in redemption's agony and fleeting glory.

Praise for Suburban Pornography & Other Stories:

"... a challenge to the entrenched notion of CanLit as a bastion of politesse, where sex always occurs in soft focus, only hardened criminals do drugs, and the travails of modern life, if they are dealt with at all, are burnished to a golden hue in prose that is lyrical, poetic, and utterly devoid of life.

"The 17 stories in Suburban Pornography take a blowtorch to that idea of Canadian literature, setting it alight and crafting out of its ashes a series of meditations on urban malaise that are minimalist, unflinching, and profane ... Firth does what so few Canadian writers even attempt: he writes bravely about the way we live now, and for that, he should be congratulated." (Quill & Quire, starred review)

"Something is defiantly happening in the literary scene, and Suburban Pornography is more proof of that. The voice here is consistent with writers like Dan Fante, Noah Cicero, and yes, even Bukowski: there is no trickery, no grasping for 'big concepts' or postmodernism. This is life in all of its terrible, ugly beauty presented in prose that cuts straight to the heart of the matter. ...

"Firth's characters are real: we can hear them speak; we can almost smell the booze on their breath and the grease on their clothes. We sympathize with them, we feel their frustration, and we revel in their victories. Suburban Pornography, along with the other recent collections that have blown me away ... are proof positive that the much mourned short story is alive and well, and making a strong come back." (Tony O' Neill, 3:AM Magazine)

"Yes! A title that delivers. Hard, gritty writing. Gritty, hard stories. — Very, very enjoyable reading. No pretension, no bullshit." (Mitch Adams, Broken Pencil, Fiction pick of the issue)

Matthew Firth has run his own independent micro press, Black Bile Press, since 1993. He edits/publishes the literary magazine Front&Centre, and he's had a regular books column in the Ottawa Xpress since April 2002. Previous publications include the short story collections Can You Take Me There, Now?; Fresh Meat; and most recently Suburban Pornography & Other Stories (Anvil Press, 2006).

Matthew Firth's profile page