Showing results by author "M.A.C. Farrant" in All Categories

Domesticity and creativity wrestle in these hilariously skewed tales of postmodern family life.

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 maila gift of sexy lingerie.

Take David Sedaris’ self-deprecation and deep sense of the absurd and toss in a pinch Erma Bombeck’s happy skewering of domestic life: there you have M. A. C. Farrant. In this witty, affecting collection of personal essays, Farranthas a gift for making those observations that would be harrowing, if they weren’t so funny, and here tackles the absurdities of family life from both sides of the generational divide: as a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family in the 1960s, and as a mother herself to three troublesome teenagers.

Acclaimed author M.A.C. Farrant has been hailed as “a brave iconoclast” by Publishers Weekly and is well known for her pithy wit and maverick sensibilities. Broken into three sections, The Strange Truth About Us is a fusion of fragmented prose, probing questions and caustic satire. The result is both a meditation on absence and a commentary on the human penchant for complacency.

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009. Satiric and philosophical in approach, indelibly marked by wit, humor, irony, playfulness, a blend of parody and science fiction, irreverent analysis and comic existentialism, these stories celebrate the literary imagination as an antidote to the stranglehold the popular media now has on the public’s imagination.