Paperback / softback
ISBN:
9780889224711
Pages: 160
Pub. Date:
March 15 2003
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.5"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Fiction / FIC019000
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 is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic, visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer.”
— Globe & Mail
“M.A.C. Farrant is a wonderful writer of domestic comedy.”
— Bill Richardson, CBC
“A brave iconoclast.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Quixotically brilliant…”
— January Magazine
M.A.C. Farrant is the author of sixteen books: thirteen collections of satirical and philosophical short fiction; one novel, The Strange Truth About Us; a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years; a book of humorous essays, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs; and the stage adaptation of My Turquoise Years, which premiered at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre in 2013.