Some press quotes and mentions for
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim:
“In
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Jacob Wren has written a courageous, alarming and utterly original work of fiction. The ethical conundrums it addresses are myriad and relevant, and while it offers no solutions, it is relentless in its exposure of unflattering human truths that many of us, given a choice, would prefer to avoid.”
– Ian Colford,
The Seaboard Review
“This is a deeply moving, challenging novel, and certainly very prescient. What is our obligation to others, particularly those in war-torn countries? How are we implicated through the tangled threads of history? Wren has written an anti-war novel, but it’s far more nuanced and unclear than I think we’d like to believe that the position of anti-war is. … A perfectly positioned novel for the current historical moment.”
– Alison Manley,
The Miramichi Reader
“A Jacob Wren novel is known for several things: narrators undergoing neurotic self-interrogation, a consideration of the gap between theory and practice, and a certain metafictional flair when it comes to signalling the work’s own existence as a radical text. All of these authorial trademarks are sent into overdrive in
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Wren’s introspective protest novel about the role that doubt plays in any political awakening.”
– Jean Marc Ah-Sen,
Quill & Quire
“
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is an anti-war novel that reminds us of our complicity in global conflicts, while offering a glimpse of the hope that drives resistance.”
– Ariane Fournier,
Maisonneuve
“Jacob Wren’s latest scintillating work of literary fiction,
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, is a book in revolt. Wren crafts a bold and unsettling narrative with the kind of clarity to explore ethical dilemmas that are both numerous and timely.”
– Samuel Wise,
Montreal Guardian
"
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a book full of discomfort, despair, and uncertainty, as collective organizing can be; but, like collective organizing, it also brims with the energy of argument, exchange, and a staunch belief in alternative ways of living..."
- H Felix Chau Bradley,
Montreal Review of Books
"In Jacob Wren’s
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, published in September, an unnamed narrator navigates an unnamed war zone, internally monologuing on morality and pain. These slightly blurrier, vaguer worlds suggest a search for a human universal. While reference-heavy writing is stuffed, like a meme’s compaction of complex emotion and history into a single low-res image, there’s an alternative roominess: space to take ideas past previous or logical bounds, or to articulate opinions that a mutual follower hasn’t posted already. Those ideas are probably harder to sell, and to write."
- Greta Rainbow,
The Walrus
"So is it a satire of western activists’ mentality around the suffering of faraway others, or is it a case of it? Does it offer a utopianism we need, or a fantasy couched in sophistry? Yes and no, and guilty on all counts. But in risking annoying/offending everyone, like an inverted Houellebecq, its currents of maximal yearning and doubt still agitate the nervous system weeks after reading."
- Carl Wilson,
'Crritic!'
"
Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim is a swan song to fiction where the "Utopia" it imagines is NOT the utopia where a single person, through sheer tyranny of will, can change the world. It is instead a "Utopia" where "fiction" is once again useful in creating an immediate, urgent, revolutionary and libidinal mythos."
- Khashayar Mohammadi,
Called To Fiction
"Wren’s protagonist is not the first visitor from safer, more privileged parts of the world to visit revolutions in progress, and to wrestle, with varying degrees of success, with the ethical puzzles that permeate this strange, somewhat difficult but in the end important work of fiction."
- Tom Sandborn,
Rabble
"Wren underscores how Western individualism can foster inaction. Although the author wants to help, he chooses “to daydream, to consider, while moment after moment passed me by.” The most compelling chapters de-centre the writer—his language, culture, and perspective—and emphasize the community and its efforts to build a sustainable future."
- Caroline Noël,
Literary Review of Canada
"As this book unfolded, I felt increasingly yes, this is an anti-war novel in the truest sense of the word, but it also explores the war of the self against the self. The protagonist feels unworthy of being a protagonist, unworthy of his own protest and yet, it is only with writings such as these, that we can pitch our imperfect tents on the grounds of protest."
- Lisa de Nikolits,
A Turn of Phrase
"A fantastical text concerning transformation, Jacob Wren’s novel
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim follows a narrator to an unidentified liberated zone, where noncapitalist, collective practices are formed, reworked, and communalized. The zone is unidyllic as it continues to be bombed and fired upon by nearby and faraway imperialists. Amidst the daily raids, the narrator is allowed to sit in on town meetings, where economics and trade become reinvented. In one such meeting, the narrator hears a woman discussing how concerns over goods being 'too expensive' must also be applied to items being 'too cheap.' She says, 'Just as you mustn’t accept a price that is too high, you also must not fight, nor constantly search, for a price that is too low … You need to understand that those who sell you these things also need to live.'”
- Eunsong Kim,
No Aesthetic Autonomy Without Labor Autonomy
"The writing—tension explodes from every page—exists without indentations, few paragraph breaks, only the occasional reprieve from a letter or recorded interview and a bit of quoted dialogue. I haven’t read another book whose narrative structure contains as much anxiety as
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, and for me the structure is not only a defining feature but its brilliance."
- Alison Gadsby,
Junction Reads
“If the personal is political, then isn't the political personal? This was a question that I had throughout reading this reflective and well-written book. No matter where your political beliefs fall, Jacob Wren's new novel demands to be read for its poignant and propulsive nature. And I will double down on
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim on being one of the best pieces of Canadian Literature this year. Just don't let the prize lists fool you. You're smarter than that.”
– Adam Ferris
on Goodreads
"Still, Wren is one of the few “political” writers of quality working in the Canadian small press. If you are able to accept that
Dry Your Tears is more a work about the paralysis of western do-gooders than the lives of active revolutionaries, it has considerable insight to offer—particularly on the centrality of faith to radical political activism. In its final third, the protagonist and a character from “the thin strip of land” struggle with the grey lassitude of living in Canada after experiencing revolutionary life. Faith is a phenomenon fed by privation, sparked by opportunity, and sustained by fellowship—to maintain a faith in revolution in the face of the comfortable, mannered aloneness of Canadian culture requires uncommon conviction. Having thus diagnosed the challenge, Wren uses his final act of authorial sleight of hand to move himself out of the way, implying that a younger generation shaped by eroding material conditions, grounded in collectivist principles, and raised without a reflexive shame at its own being will be the locus of a change to come. It’s a notion based on faith as much as evidence, but belief is what is called for now."
- Mulgrave
on Goodreads
“Subversive and experimental in approach,
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim brings forward questions, as urgent as they are conflicted, around issues of personal responsibility in times of political turmoil. The book asks readers to confront the ethical, moral, and practical considerations of becoming involved in political struggles – especially when they are not the struggles of your own people. Who has the right to bear witness? Who has the right to tell the stories of others? Does Wren’s narrator act out of courage and compassion? Or the curiosity of a tourist? Original in its form and passionate in its prose, Wren has offered an important anti-war novel that poses big questions and dares the world to answer.”
- Jury comments from
2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Plus:
Writer’s Block at All Lit UpPossible Politics: A recommended reading list at 49th Shelf
Interview with Open BookInterview with Cult MTL
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim was #3 on the
October edition of the Hamilton Review of Books' Independently Published Bestsellers List and
a bestseller at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.
*
Read an excerpt at
Send My Love To Anyone.
More recently, I posted an excerpt I believe might be something of a reader favourite.
Order it here.
Also, if you're feeling extra generous and would like to help me continue writing books, you can find my Patreon here.
.
