news | Wednesday October 17, 2012

Stranger Than Fiction?

On Friday, October 19, 2012, authors M.A.C. Farrant and Garry Thomas Morse will appear at the 2012 Vancouver Writers Festival.

M.A.C. Farrant’s latest book The Strange Truth About Us: A Novel of Absence was described in The Globe and Mail as

a full-bodied incarnation of the vitality and the gravity of the fragment as literary form. It fairly vibrates with what Paz calls the “contrapuntal unity” of fragments connecting, reflecting and deflecting in variable relation to each other.

Recently on the Lemon Hound blog, Steven W. Beattie of Quill & Quire included the “frank surrealism” of Morse’s Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus among a handful of books that

are not the kinds of books that would appeal to the cozy sensibilities that seem to be driving so much of our literary culture these days.

With ever shrinking space available for book news and reviews, and in the wake of rumours that The National Post is scaling back its arts and books section, Beattie goes on to ask an interesting question that may or may not pertain to both of these books of unconventional fiction.

[If] the major media outlets and award juries tend to focus solely on predictable, easygoing fare, where does that leave writers who have ambitions to do something different or less familiar?

An interesting thought indeed. Discuss.