By Stuart Ross
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer takes up where Stuart Ross’s Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer left off in 2005. Memoir, tirade, unsolicited advice — this new volume is drawn largely from Stuart’s notorious “Hunkamooga” column that ran in subTerrain, but also includes pieces from his blog as well as previously unpublished work.
Here they are together in their offbeat brilliance: snarky, provocative, funny, outlandish, and self-deprecating, these “confessions” are urgent dispatches that disrupt the too often polite conversation concerning Canadian literary matters. In these pages, Ross says what so many others only think.
REVIEWERS ON CONFESSIONS OF A SMALL PRESS RACKETEER
“For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it’s difficult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross’s latest effort. … Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn’t about flowers and meadows, it’s about blood and guts.”
— Steven Knight, Quill & Quire
“… a wonderful book — funny, outrageous, and acute. I’ll even say it’s the best short-essay collection about the writing life that I’ve read in ages. … Every aspiring writer should read Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, just to find inspiration. And so should every established writer — just to keep humble.”
— Lynne Van Luven, Malahat Review
“Of greatest interest … are those endnotes which deal with the results of his publishing certain columns — such as losing his publisher, or losing friends from the writing community. This fallout, however, may have been expected as Ross is frequently acerbic and trenchant in his criticism, but no less witty or correct for being so.”
— Stephen Cain, Canadian Literature
Stuart Ross is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and small press guerrilla living in Cobourg, Ontario. The recipient of the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize and the 2010 Relit Prize for Short Fiction, among others, Stuart is the author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, most recently The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press, 2022) and 70 Kippers: The Dagmar Poems (with Michael Dennis; Proper Tales Press, 2020). Stuart has taught workshops in schools across the country and was Writer-in-Residence at Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa. His work has been translated into French, Norwegian, Slovene, Russian, Spanish, and Estonian. I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub is his third collection of short fiction.
