Additional information
by Jacob Wren (Author)
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 Biography
JACOB WREN makes literature, performances, and exhibitions. His books include Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed; Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2014); Rich and Poor (finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2016); Authenticity is a Feeling; and Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim. He is artistic co-director of the Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART. Wren lives in Montreal.
