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“Martens’s haunting, darkly funny situations, captured in crisp, spare prose, will appeal to fans of George Saunders.”

— Publishers Weekly

“[Martens is a] stylist who delivers his most powerful satiric points with laser sharp accuracy and lyrically beautiful language.”

— Vancouver Sun

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New Book

No Call Too Small

The stories in No Call Too Small represent micro-scale disaster tourism on a winding road that is long and dark. Driving too fast, weaving between flaming wrecks, and drifting through cliff-side curves, there’s little choice but to hang on and meet whatever’s over the rise head on.

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Martens’s striking, perceptive collection illuminates a range of Canadians in moments of bad luck and dissatisfaction.

In the title story, an unnamed Port Moody, B.C., cop, whose face has been disfigured from a dog attack, refuses to wear his prosthetic nose, costing him his relationship and earning him the nickname “The Face.” Martens’s haunting, darkly funny situations, captured in crisp, spare prose, will appeal to fans of George Saunders.

— Publishers Weekly

I knew Oscar Martens was the real thing when I first read him over twenty years ago.

These new stories offer fresh evidence aplenty. Smart, honest, sparely eloquent, moving, humane, and disillusioned in the healthiest sense of a word that gets way too much bad press. Martens is funny, too, desperately so—and how else is a writer supposed to observe and portray this world we’ve made?

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The Big Melt reviewed by Susan Haley

By |December 11th, 2023|Categories: Media Whore Blog|

You’d think it was akin to publishing launch codes by the way this affair has been handled, but a few people really didn’t want you to read this review. In the end, as many suspected, it was not a racist rant that somehow snuck on to the pages of The Fiddlehead. The crime, if there was one, was a review that wasn’t 100% favourable and supportive of Emily Riddle’s work. You’ll probably never hear about one inexplicably powerful person who decided to smash up this small corner of CanLit, with [...]

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