Pockets

Brilliant experimental, surrealist fiction from the award-winning author of Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew

A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments — both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem “chapters,” the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is filled with profound loss, and with emptinesses he attempts to fill — including the emptiness of his pockets. It is also a landscape of trilobite fossils, bicycles with banana seats, the Beatles and the Cowsills, a brother who drifts through the sky, Red Skelton, a 1923 Singer sewing machine, and shadows that both comfort and threaten.

A heartbreakingly personal and profound work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive, pocket-sized. Every reading brings new revelations.