Career Suicide!: Contemporary Literary Humour

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

The poems, essays, and drawings in this anthology are the equivalent of
an open stage in a comedy club—very mixed in talent and delivery. Some
of the authors aim to shock through scatology but only disgust; no one
here is a genius of the outrageous like Georges Bataille, the French
theorist and practitioner of the nauseating. The best pieces are by two
well-established authors, Margaret Christakos and Todd Swift, who should
avoid amateur nights in the club. There’s no point in pointing to the
less successful authors. They will probably feel embarrassed themselves
after a few years. Contemporary literature needs more humour, but this
book doesn’t fill the gap.