About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Description
These new, off-side stories continue M.A.C. Farrant’s exploration of the relation of fiction to the evolving corporate construction of reality in the media and information age. Objective reality (what’s out there) in our culture has become a performance of make-believe (fiction), and the disassociation and confusion this causes in our private lives often triggers uncontrollable tragi-comic effects in people—a deadening lethargy and/or a destructive violence acted out in a context of the most excruciatingly bright banalities.
Reading The Origin of the Species today, we realize that the prevailing view of the universe is always only that—the prevailing view—and that the job at hand is therefore to discover the constantly recurring human “will to meaning,” the ways in which we frame existence, sustaining ourselves in the face of what we continue to convince ourselves is the inevitable.
Darwin Alone in the Universe stands against the view that we live in a “post-historical” world in which whatever history we now possess is served up as the current spectacle in a tyranny of the perpetual “now.” It is a reaffirmation of history as a process that clears a path through the world, making sense of making sense, temporarily. In this, or any world, literature becomes an antidote to the stranglehold the corporate media has on the public’s imagination, and is the place where uncontaminated thought can still be found, “where individual voices surface relentlessly like life-rings in a wild sea.”
Contributor Notes
M.A.C. Farrant
M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Farrant’s work is infused with acerbic wit and iconoclastic innovation. As the Globe & Mail has noted, “Farrant is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer”.
Editorial Reviews
“A brave iconoclast.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Quixotically brilliant…”
— January Magazine
“M.A.C. Farrant is a wonderful writer of domestic comedy.”
— Bill Richardson, CBC
“Farrant is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic, visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer.”
— Globe & Mail
