“In their bounce from Italy to Canada and back, these stories, so rich and funny and knowing, remind us that Jarman is not just one of our best stylists, but best writers. His sentences are cunning, like they have eyes that can see in the dark.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A book by Jarman is a bit like a concept album, the language arranged in musical and meaningful ways.”
– Quill & Quire

“Jarman’s stories are exquisite and powerful, finding beauty even within pain. They demand to be read again and again.”
– Publisher’s Weekly

“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.”
– Vancouver Sun

“Jarman pulls off some ferociously good writing.”
– The Winnipeg Review

“… one of Canada’s most accomplished prose stylists, with an affection for jazzy rhythms and oblique angles.”
– The Globe and Mail

“Jarman’s descriptions of Italy’s managed chaos of ruins and tourist traps and crowded cities are witty, evocative and, when he turns his attention to the displaced peoples from Africa, the Middle East and the Baltic states living rough in the dirty streets, often quite moving.”
– Toronto Star

“One of Canada’s most accomplished prose stylists, with an affection for jazzy rhythms and oblique angles… the writing will be familiar to aficionados of the author’s earlier work — the trilling sentences, the insouciant alliteration and assonance, the rococo metaphors, the sudden shifts in tone from light to dark, humour to startling violence.”
– The Globe and Mail

“…as much travelogue, novel in hiding and prose poem as it is a collection of stand-alone stories. In fact, many of the stories do not stand alone. Rather, they lean on each other, interweave and inform each other, sharing a narrator, point of view, main characters and setting.”
– Atlantic Books Today

“Jarman’s prose has the momentum of travel, with vivid images and flashes of understanding about another way of life.”
– Foreword Reviews

“Everywhere, there is exacting, original, exciting language, all of which propels the reader through what initially appears to be the most pedestrian of themes — a mid-life crisis.”
– SubTerrain