Throughout her childhood, Marion Farrant heard exotic stories of the sophisticated life her mother, Nancy, led aboard cruise ships and in Australia. Nancy’s world of furs, jewels, cigarette holders, and handsome men seemed miles away from the west-coast hamlet of Cordova Bay, where Marion lived with her aunt and uncle, running wild on the beach with her friends and enjoying weekend visits with her devoted father. But things changed the year she entered her teens. First, a package from Nancy arrived in the mail—a gift of sexy lingerie. Next, Nancy threw everyone into a tizzy with the surprise announcement that she was coming for a visit. In this memoir of her fourteenth summer, Marion Farrant captures a lost time and place with hilarity and affection. The setting is Vancouver Island, the year 1960. It is the heyday of the nuclear family; the time of the Three Stooges, the Red Menace, and Whipper Billy Watson; the apex of plastic, arborite, and everything turquoise:...

In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures" that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear window.Inside the linoleum-lined kitchens and lace-trimmed living rooms that drift through these stories, Farrant interrupts the daily routines – doctor's appointments, gardening, mealtimes – of her eccentric yet familiar characters with intensely surreal, laugh-out-loud moments. What happens when a whimsical spirit becomes captive to a middle-aged body? At the end of a Love Your Package workshop, what does the wrap-up dinner look like? Can a soggy tomato salad really end someone's marriage? Brimming with pathos and bathos in equal measure, Farrant's smart prose offers escape and renewal from the monotony of modern life, while at the same time poking fun at her readers' pathological devotion to the...

This brilliant collection of satirical short stories explores the evolving corporate construction of reality in the media and information age.

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009, including the complete suite of eighteen stories, The North Pole, in which our individual existences are bludgeoned by the threat of “end times”—climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics.

This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant, whom Publishers Weekly has celebrated as “a brave iconoclast" and whose work the Globe & Mail has said “bristles with moral fury ... at the absurdities of our accelerated age and a great dose of laugh-out-loud humour," offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.A three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world.“Annotations About an Absence" is a series of 115 numbered annotations to the day-long ruminations of a retired couple living in a gated community attempting to create an imaginary novel in which they express their fears about the future: “We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life. Which is? We are...

Who doesn't read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what's to come, how to live? Fortune-telling, sex, death, love, ordinary and special days, time passing, humor making it all bearable—these are the repeated gestures running through The Days, a kind of absurdist guidebook made up of ninety unconventional very short stories collected in three tight sections. This is fiction that thinks, stories told with trademark humor and acerbic wit.M.A.C. Farrant previous title in this series of very short fiction, The World Afloat: Miniatures, won the City of Victoria Book Butler Book Prize for 2014.