About the Author

Stuart Ross is a Toronto fiction writer, poet, editor, and creative-writing instructor. He has published two collaborative novels, a collection of stories, six poetry collections, and a collection of personal essays, and he is the editor of the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence. Ross co-founded, with Nicholas Power, the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, an underground literary institution since 1987. He is currently the Fiction & Poetry Editor for This Magazine and Guest Poetry Editor for Toronto’s Mansfield Press.

Reviews

“Stuart Ross writes with the gleefully overstimulated satirical imagination of a George Saunders or Mark Leyner, with lobe-rattlingly smart language and storylines that are culture-crazed, funny and full of strange betrayals and sociopolitical intrigue. The many comic absurdities feel inspired by global catastrophe as they cleave hypocrisy down to the ridiculous individual.” — Lee Henderson“Hank Williams haunts the stories in Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, but Randy Newman is the book’s presiding spirit. Like Newman, Stuart Ross delivers wit with a bitter bite. Somehow, his melancholy is humorous; his misanthropy, humane; his absurdity, believable. With deadpan style and Tin Pan Alley timing, Ross has given us a hilarious, harrowing book.” — Derek McCormack