Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim by Jacob Wren

What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren’t your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.

A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it’s a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that’s being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life—from this reimagined society and elsewhere—underscore truths hidden in plain sight.

In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

Praise for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

“By turns a revolutionary’s memoir, an adventurer’s journal, autofiction, and speculative fiction, yet Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim always stays clear and committed to its searching style, and this makes it a novel for today’s uncertain world.” —Kaie Kellough, author of Dominoes at the Crossroads

“A stunning thought experiment where our hypocrisy, culpability, and compassion are all exposed, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a thought-provoking work of secular expiation, a knowing knot of courage and its opposite, and a defiant work of desperate grace.” —Eugene Lim, author of Search History

Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennn Prize for Fiction jury citation:

Subversive and experimental in approach, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim brings forward questions, as urgent as they are conflicted, around issues of personal responsibility in times of political turmoil.

The book asks readers to confront the ethical, moral, and practical considerations of becoming involved in political struggles – especially when they are not the struggles of your own people. Who has the right to bear witness? Who has the right to tell the stories of others? Does Wren’s narrator act out of courage and compassion? Or the curiosity of a tourist? Original in its form and passionate in its prose, Wren has offered an important anti-war novel that poses big questions and dares the world to answer.

Press Coverage

Most Anticipated: Our Fall Fiction Preview —49th Shelf

2024 Fall Preview: Fiction —Quill & Quire

64 Canadian fiction books to read in fall 2024 —CBC Books

Here are the Canadian books we can’t wait to read this September —CBC Books

“In Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Jacob Wren has written a courageous, alarming and utterly original work of fiction. The ethical conundrums it addresses are myriad and relevant, and while it offers no solutions, it is relentless in its exposure of unflattering human truths that many of us, given a choice, would prefer to avoid.” —Ian Colford, The Seaboard Review

Writer’s Block with Jacob Wren —All Lit Up

Possible Politics: A Recommended Reading List by Jacob Wren —49th Shelf

Jacob Wren Stumbles Into a Strange Utopia Amidst a Raging War Zone in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim —Open Book

“Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a perfectly positioned novel for the current historical moment. I only hope that we can all read it and grapple, together.” —Alison Manley, The Miramichi Reader

“A Jacob Wren novel is known for several things: narrators undergoing neurotic self-interrogation, a consideration of the gap between theory and practice, and a certain metafictional flair when it comes to signalling the work’s own existence as a radical text. All of these authorial trademarks are sent into overdrive in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Wren’s introspective protest novel about the role that doubt plays in any political awakening.” —Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Quill & Quire

“Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is an anti-war novel that reminds us of our complicity in global conflicts, while offering a glimpse of the hope that drives resistance.” —Ariane Fournier, Maisonneuve

“Jacob Wren’s latest scintillating work of literary fiction, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, is a book in revolt. Wren crafts a bold and unsettling narrative with the kind of clarity to explore ethical dilemmas that are both numerous and timely.” —Samuel Wise, Montreal Guardian

“Dry Your Tears is a book full of discomfort, despair, and uncertainty, as collective organizing can be; but, like collective organizing, it also brims with the energy of argument, exchange, and a staunch belief in alternative ways of living in opposition to war and subjugation.” —H Felix Chau Bradley, Montreal Review of Books

“In Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim…an unnamed narrator navigates an unnamed war zone, internally monologuing on morality and pain. These slightly blurrier, vaguer worlds suggest a search for a human universal. While reference-heavy writing is stuffed, like a meme’s compaction of complex emotion and history into a single low-res image, there’s an alternative roominess: space to take ideas past previous or logical bounds, or to articulate opinions that a mutual follower hasn’t posted already. Those ideas are probably harder to sell, and to write.” —Greta Rainbow, The Walrus

“Is it a satire of western activists’ mentality around the suffering of faraway others, or is it a case of it? Does it offer a utopianism we need, or a fantasy couched in sophistry? Yes and no, and guilty on all counts. But in risking annoying/offending everyone, like an inverted Houellebecq, its currents of maximal yearning and doubt still agitate the nervous system weeks after reading.” —Carl Wilson’s Substack newsletter ‘Crritic!‘

Episode 277 – Jacob Wren —Talking Books and Stuff podcast

The Hamilton Review of Books’ Independently Published Bestsellers List: October 2024 —Hamilton Review of Books

“Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim” is a swan song to fiction where the “Utopia” it imagines is NOT the utopia where a single person, through sheer tyranny of will, can change the world. It is instead a “Utopia” where “fiction” is once again useful in creating an immediate, urgent, revolutionary and libidinal mythos.” —Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi’s blog

Jacob Wren on Season 4, Episode 1 “Wither Giller” —Hamilton Review of Books Podcast

“It is difficult to portray depression and torpor in ways that do not depress and immobilize the reader, and in large measure Wren pulls off that difficult task, while incorporating some of the currently popular themes of auto fiction… some readers will find it fascinating, and use it as an invitation to tough reflection about their own political and literary work.” —Tom Sandborn, Rabble