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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.
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Description
“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.
M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her work is infused with acerbic wit and innovation, and her surrealistic visions of everyday life are startlingly precise.
Contributor Notes
Born in Sydney, Australia and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her writing has been widely anthologized in North America and has been dramatized for television; Farrant is also a frequent contributor to leading magazines such as Adbusters and Geist. Her 2004 memoir, My Turquoise Years, is being adapted into a stage play in conjunction with the Arts Club Theatre of Vancouver; production is slated for the 2011/12 season.
Farrant has taught fiction workshops in Canada and Australia. She was a visiting writer-in-residence at Macquarie University in Sydney. A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, B.C., she has also taught part-time at the creative writing department in the University of Victoria and reviews books for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe & Mail.
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”.
BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist.”
Awards
- , One of the Top Twenty-Three Canadian Fiction Books (Globe and Mail)
Editorial Reviews
“a novel, a memoir, a prose poem, a reading list, a note book, a book of quotations, a manifesto. It’s a work of intellectual speculation on what the world is going to look like in a few years. … experimental, brave, daring, unusual, brilliant.”
– J.S. Porter
“The Strange Truth About Us is shot through with Farrant’s subversive wit, her acute sense of irony, As well as being poetic and thought-provoking, it is quite funny.”
– Victoria Times Colonist
“The Strange Truth About Us is impossible to summarize, save to say that it is both an acknowledgment of and an antidote to all the uncertainty we must shoulder in this, our age of anxiety and absence. Delightful and disturbing in all the best ways, this book addresses that which mostly remains unspoken in ways that have seldom been spoken before.”
– Globe and Mail
“One thing is sure: the format invites – if not demands – us to dip into the book again and again for insights that are funny, timely, provocative and unsettling.”
– Prairie Fire Review of Books
“Farrant pulls you into the absence, scrapes you around the side of it, and spits you back out, confused and satisfied. … her prose tends to be acerbic and funny, a little jarring, and her stories are constructed to resonate with the reader long after the book is done. The Strange Truth About Us left me feeling unsettled and slightly anxious, but in a way that felt necessary. It is well worth the read.”
– Herizons
