Pockets

A Novel

by Stuart Ross

tagged: literary, jewish, canadian

Description

Brilliant experimental, surrealist fiction from the award-winning author of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew

A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments — both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of trilobite fossils, bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can’t help but try to fill.

A heartbreakingly personal and profound work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive, pocket-sized. Every reading brings new revelations.

About the Author

Stuart Ross is the author of 25 books of fiction, poetry, and personal essays, as well as scores of chapbooks. His most recent books are the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award, and the short story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub. Stuart won the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize, the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2010 Relit Award for Short Fiction. Since 1979, Stuart has run a micropress called Proper Tales. In the 1980s, he sold over 7,000 of his chapbooks on the streets of Toronto, wearing signs such as 'Writer Going To Hell: Buy My Books.' His poetry has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovene, and Estonian. Stuart lives in the tiny town of Cobourg, on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

Contributor Notes

Stuart Ross is a writer, editor, and writing teacher living in Cobourg, Ontario. He is the acclaimed author of 20 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His recent books include Our Days in Vaudeville (Mansfield Press, 2014), A Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015), Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil Press, 2015), and A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016). He was shortlisted for the 2000 Trillium Book Award, won the 2010 ReLit Prize for Short Fiction for Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009), and his novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (ECW Press, 2011) was co-winner of the 2012 Mona Elaine Adilman Award.

Awards

Short-listed, Eric Hoffer Book Award

Editorial Review

“Each brief page of this brief, surrealistic novel brims with the unexpected, the astonishing, the odd … Pockets is a beautiful little book.” — The Murdock

“These untitled micro-chapters fit together like Lego blocks built by William S. Bourroughs and his wild Brion Gysin friend. Stuart Ross simply never fails to delight, surprise and inform as he entertains … Today’s Book of Poetry doesn’t really know any other poets like Stuart Ross. But if you were to take Kurt Vonnegut’s imagination, a Garrison Keillor sense of the storyteller and candy twisted it all together with a generous dose of wit and wisdom from Randy Newman and his melodious lamentations, you would be nearing the mark.” — Today’s Book of Poetry

“Pockets pioneers a new novel form, giving readers the opportunity to become the protagonist, to know what it feels like to be the singular person that is the cumulation of all these moments and memories stacked on top of each other, each one distorted by the last.” — Prairie Fire

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Pockets

A Novel

by Stuart Ross

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