Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

By (author): Jacob Wren

Finalist for the 2024 Quebec Writers Federation Fiction Award

Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

Finalist for the 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren’t your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.

A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it’s a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that’s being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life—from this reimagined society and elsewhere—underscore truths hidden in plain sight.

In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

AUTHOR

Jacob Wren

JACOB WREN makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, and Polyamorous Love Song (a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of the Globe and Mail‘s 100 best books of 2014). His most recent book Rich and Poor, was a finalist for the 2016 Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En francais comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.

Reviews

ltem gtDry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aimis a perfectly positioned novel for the current historical moment I only hope that we can all read it and grapple together ltem gtThe Miramichi Reader

Worth a look and some thoughtful examination ltem gtrabble