Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew

“Consistently minimalist and nostalgic but also variously touching, hilarious, and sad.” — Booklist

Ben is a performance artist about to enter his forties. His father and mother are both dead, and his brother, Jake, is a lousy source of information. So when he begins to struggle with a particularly nagging memory, he doesn’t know where to turn. The memory: the assassination — by his mother — of a prominent neo-Nazi.

In a non-chronological montage of memories, Ben travels back and forth through the events of his life, some of which seemed trivial at the time but are important now: his childhood summers at a cottage in central Ontario, his teenage years in a Toronto suburb, his disastrous university career, the calamity that precipitated his brother’s institutionalization.

Stuart Ross’s first novel is a blend of suburban realism and out-of-body surrealism.

AUTHOR

Stuart Ross

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.

Reviews

“Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew succeeds not only because of Ross’s distinctive style, but also because he can think and feel with the best of them, and shows maturity of vision without sacrificing the childish sense of play and absurdity his readers expect from him.” — Globe and Mail
“Ross’s slight first novel is composed of brief, somber, funny tales … These are sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor.”— Publishers Weekly