It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life.
The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What is life, but ordinary and special days, time passing, humour, sex, death, and love (making it all bearable)?
All these are repeated gestures that run 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, fiction that cuts to the chase, told with Farrant’s trademark humour and acerbic wit. Her miniatures gracefully articulate the contemporary zeitgeist: anxiety about the future coupled with absurd mundanity. Somehow, always, Farrant captures the moments that buoy us up, crystallizing the experiences keeping us from being overwhelmed while calling our attention to overwhelming truths.
Let yourself be excited and delighted. Farrant’s artfully spare stories – averaging a couple of paragraphs each – offer enough food for thought (and mood) to keep you going for months. Dip in occasionally to be reminded of the strangeness of us, or read from beginning to end and immerse yourself in a slightly skewed version of reality – one in which people are frank and the world is unforgiving as it shimmers like light on water, sometimes blinding, always dazzling.
Industry Reviews
"A beguiling, quirky delight ... Ever-whimsical and confidently left-field. ... It is fully possible to discern serious intent behind the book's gleeful riffling through cultural ephemera; the odd humor, off-center observations, and clever wordplay anchor the book ... A tilted or askew vision operates throughout and takes readers to unexpected but rewarding places."
--Publishers Weekly
"One of the best humorists in the land."
- Ottawa Citizen
"The short prose pieces in this new collection are sharp and shapely embodiments of the old adage 'Less is more.' Here M.A.C. Farrant curates her own brilliant and uneasy theory of modern life where every day is 'a combination of breath and panic and glory'."
--Diane Schoemperlen
"Once again M.A.C. Farrant has delivered a packet of fictional snippets with heft. ... Grounded in the everyday, Farrant's observations reveal the unusual in the usual, and she does it with her charming and quirky sense of humour. ... Farrant has her finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary life and can see both its beauty and its flaws, and they're often the same thing. ... The Days: Forecasts, Warnings, Advice is great fun, but it also makes you look at the world in a fresh way."
--Vancouver Sun
"Nimbly walking the tightrope between prose and poetry ... knife-sharp narratives ... an odd, Alice in Wonderland-esque calendar ... You can feel you're growing older in the few hours it takes to read these tales. ... a book that doesn't give the brain a moment's rest."
--Pacific Rim Review of Books
"Hilarious, absurd, these pieces of micro-fiction are like a mirror held up to the reader's life. Farrant's spare prose packs full stories into a few short paragraphs that you will be thinking about for weeks afterwards. She has her finger on the pulse of our times."
--City of Victoria Butler Book Prize jury, 2017
"The miniatures of The World Afloat are as wild as colorful birthday helium balloons released into a hurricane; small points of cheerful light whirled in a dark and violent wind ... Like poems, or recalled fragments of dreams, these kinds of stories are meant to resonate, rather than reveal, to stir up the mental sludge, flush out the septic tank of the subconscious, to make us feel more truly aware and alive."
- John Moore, BC Bookworld
