The Gimmick: Novelettes, stories, and sketches

"Vern Smith is a phantasmatic presence hovering over hard luck debacles and muted urban theater, colloquy consisting of full-bodied gestures captured in the word, messy lives tangled at the root, twisting misshapen into bloom. He haunts the North American literary canon with a salt-of-the-earth journalist's ear for the unspoken and unspeakable. There is an uncanny violence to these selections, as if there before the fact, now willed into expression in lean, muscular, lockstep cadences that ...