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."
Farrant, M. a. C.: -
M.A.C. Farrant has been writing and publishing since the 1980s: Nineteen works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir; two produced plays, countless book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and Toronto Globe & Mail; and over a dozen chapbooks. Along with Pauline Holdstock, she ran the Sidney Reading Series from 1994-2009.
Her books have been finalists for many awards, among them the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the Ethel Wilson fiction prize, two Jessie Richardson theatre awards, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the ReLit Award, the Gemini Awards for the Bravo short film adaptation of her story, Rob's Guns & Ammo, and the Victoria Book Prize (three times), the last of which she won in 2014 for her collection of miniature fiction, The World Afloat. The Strange Truth About Us was one of the Globe & Mail's Best Fiction books of 2012.
Her 2021 non-fiction book, One Good Thing, was a BC Bestseller. Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces, another non-fiction book, was released in 2023. In 2024, Talon Books will issue the expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of her memoir, My Turquoise Years.
Her most recent chapbooks are Some of the Puzzles (2021) and The Literary Cow Festival (2024) both from above/ground press in Ottawa. Talonbooks is the publisher of her last ten books.
Farrant is well-known for her acerbic wit and laugh-out-loud humour. BC Bookworld has called her "Canada's most acerbic and intelligent humourist". Bill Richardson has called her "a master of the Zen-like art of delivering weight in a way that is featherlight" further noting that she's "the most accomplished and unapologetic miniaturist in Canadian letters." Archived material is in the "Special Collections Branch" at the University of Victoria.
