"...almost everyone in academia feels like an outsider, nobody knows what’s going on. Academia is an empty vessel, but the ones who don’t realize it end up going all the way and end up in charge." – Marco Roth

"Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough." - Booth Tarkington

"Literature – even though people usually study it author by author – is always a dialog amongst many voices which intersect and reply to each other within literature and outside it." - Italo Calvino

"I struggled with some demons / They were middle class and tame" - Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker

"We depend on incongruities and irregularities in the official narrative, so-called 'spaceship moments,' to confirm what we already know, namely that we're alive in a substandard fiction that doesn't add up." - Isabel Waidner, Sterling Karat Gold

"…the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t." – Fanny Howe, Bewilderment

Mark your calendars. Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim events coming soon in Montreal, Toronto, Mississauga and Vancouver. radicalcut.blogspot.com/2024/08/dry-yo…

“Every artist finds they are no longer fashionable at some point. There are no exceptions, none. And so all you do is you keep going, and you try to keep writing, a better song than the last one. It’s what I’ve always done.” – Joan Armatrading

"The nation was a bawling historical infant masquerading as a biblical patriarch." - Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

"as long as the assumptions are the same, nothing will change." – nikki giovanni

“I was walking around the streets, I needed this pause. I was trying to finish a novel that lay bleeding, abandoned halfway through…” – Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

"She’d learned recently that solid land was not the natural skin of the earth, only a kind of parasitic condition that surfaced and receded in million-year cycles. The natural skin of the earth was water, and all water on earth was connected." - Omar El Akkad, American War

The very first review of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim: “…a courageous, alarming and utterly original work of fiction.” theseaboardreview.substack.com/p/in-dry-your-…

"This border is rotten meat, a hallucination, a wavering line a stupid idea. Can't we blink and it'll be gone?" - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Bodymap

"Reality is not static—its properties are in constant flux, so perhaps we are as much in the world as we can ever be, and that’s the problem." - Renee Gladman, The Activist

You’re only as good as your last mistake.

In Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Jacob Wren has written a courageous, alarming and utterly original work of fiction." Ian Colford reviews the latest novel by Jacob Wren for The Seaboard Review: theseaboardreview.substack.com/p/in-dry-your-…

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim by Jacob Wren is up for giveaway at 49th Shelf. Enter now for your chance to win 1 of 3 available copies: 49thshelf.com/Giveaways

"When the game is over, the king and the pawn are put into the same box." - Federico Fellini

The sweet spot between finished and unfinished.