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
A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom. Some of the book’s miniatures are narratives with a twist, others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental novelist “sitting in” on the obituary-writing session convened by her husband, or the woman who rescues an Atlantic lobster from her local Save-On-Foods and ships it to Prince Edward Island to be released back into the ocean. The miniatures of The Great Happiness are “fictions that think,” each one a combination of narrative, prose poem, and jest.
The Great Happiness is the third part in M.A.C. Farrant’s trilogy of miniature fiction published by Talonbooks, preceded by The World Afloat, winner of the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, and The Days, nominated for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and the ReLit Award.
Contributor Notes
M.A.C. Farrant is the author of fourteen works of fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and over one hundred book reviews and essays for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe & Mail. Her memoir, My Turquoise Years, which she adapted for the stage, premiered April 4 to May 4, 2013 at the Arts Club Theatre’s Granville Island Stage in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her novel, The Strange Truth About Us: A Novel of Absence, was chosen by The Globe & Mail as a Best Book of 2012. The World Afloat: Miniatures, a collection of very short fiction, won the City of Victoria Book Butler Book Prize for 2014.
A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, B.C., Farrant’s work as been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, National Magazine Awards, Victoria Book Prize, and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for her play My Turquoise Years, among others. She has taught writing at the University of Victoria, Victoria School of Writing, and Banff Centre for the Arts, and was writer-in-residence at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
