A doll taped to the hood of a wedding car. A list of favorite cocktails from the eighties. Hide the drugs from your parents "and" your kids. Kevin Costner in "Waterworld": hot or not? "Smoke Show" is a novel that will astound readers with its audacious, stripped-down narrative set in the mid-nineties about assorted losers, diehards, and lost souls, seen through a hazy filter of bus fumes and cigarette smoke. Told in "real time," "Smoke Show" is raw, candid, and amorphous, told through jargon and petty dialogue commonly heard in the street or on public transit. Clint Burnham evokes William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Irvine Welsh in this novel, a confounding period piece that takes no prisoners.

Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer and teacher. His previous books include the story collection Airborne Photo (1999), the poetry collection Buddyland (2000), Be Labour Reading (1997), and numerous others great and small.