Smoke Show

by Clint Burnham

A doll taped to the hood of a wedding car. A list of favorite cocktails from the eighties. Hide the drugs from your parents and your kids. Kevin Costner in Waterworld : hot or not? Smoke Show is a novel that will astound readers with its audacious, stripped-down narrative set in the mid-nineties about assorted losers, diehards, and lost souls, seen through a hazy filter of bus fumes and cigarette smoke. Told in “real time,” Smoke Show is raw, candid, and amorphous, told through jargon and petty dialogue commonly heard in the street or on public transit. Clint Burnham evokes William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Irvine Welsh in this novel, a confounding period piece that takes no prisoners.

Genres: Canada

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

Clint Burnham is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada, where he also teaches theory and popular culture. His books include The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (1995), The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2011), and the collections Digital Natives (2011, co-ed. with Lorna Brown) and From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom (2012, co-ed. with Paul Budra).

Reviews

[Sal · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a lot of pot-smokers and would-be junkies' conversational dialogue. Entire pages with only a sentence of text.