The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for those of us who seem to have lost both our way and our attention span. Unsparing in her critique of the New Age syncretism the mall culture has substituted for authentic emotion and belief, our adoption of Buddhism appears in her work as a rationalization for our ubiquitous materialism of the soul, Zen as our guiltless doctrine of neglect.

Yet as in all such relentlessly dystopian social parodies, there resides behind each of these brief entertainments a stifled scream for help, a trapped yearning for genuine human contact and sympathy, an arrested existential lust for meaning. Where has our sense of order, propriety, history and community gone, Farrant’s stories beg to wonder—stories that span the stylistic range of personal journal, objective reportage, fiction, fantasy and writers’ workshop exercise? In order to answer these questions, Farrant’s new stories meticulously trace the breakdown of our language by ridding it of everything unnecessary and excessive: the breakdown of the post- Kierkegaard, post-Sartre existential position through its extension into the absurd; the breakdown of sense and sensibility through its alienation from perception; and the breakdown of discourse in literary craft, the social occasion and the commoditization of the individual and its attendant merchandizing of desire. Each of these stories is a new instance of the author’s ongoing attempt at understanding language ironically—through itself—a willingness to let the deadly serious be as playful as it wants to be, a courageous shedding of what Tom Robbins called “the tyranny of the dull mind.”

M.A.C. Farrant has been writing and publishing since the 1980s: Nineteen works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir; two produced plays, countless book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and Toronto Globe & Mail; and over a dozen chapbooks. Along with Pauline Holdstock, she ran the Sidney Reading Series from 1994–2009.Her books have been finalists for many awards, among them the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Ethel Wilson fiction prize, two Jessie Richardson theatre awards, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the ReLit Award, the Gemini Awards for the Bravo short film adaptation of her story, Rob’s Guns & Ammo, and the Victoria Book Prize (three times), the last of which she won in 2014 for her collection of miniature fiction, The World Afloat. The Strange Truth About Us was one of the Globe & Mail’s Best Fiction books of 2012.Her 2021 non-fiction book, One Good Thing, was a BC Bestseller. Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces, another non-fiction book, was released in 2023. In 2024, Talon Books will issue the expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of her memoir, My Turquoise Years.Her most recent chapbooks are Some of the Puzzles (2021) and The Literary Cow Festival (2024) both from above/ground press in Ottawa. Talonbooks is the publisher of her last ten books.Farrant is well-known for her acerbic wit and laugh-out-loud humour. BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist”. Bill Richardson has called her “a master of the Zen-like art of delivering weight in a way that is featherlight” further noting that she’s “the most accomplished and unapologetic miniaturist in Canadian letters.”

M.A.C. Farrant's profile page

“The Breakdown So Far is a fantastic and whimsical challenge to the intellectual doom of everyday life. [Farrant] is an elegant and spare writer, whipping up a foam of visionary ideas with a few short strokes of language.”
— Ottawa Xpress

“The Breakdown So Far is challenging, unnerving, unforgettable and very unlikely. If, as Nabokov advises, the monster of grim common sense must be ‘shot dead,’ then Farrant is, indeed, a crack shot.”
— Globe and Mail

“A brave iconoclast …”
— Publishers Weekly

“Farrant is a master of the literary equivalent of a waking dream, creating subtle insurrections disguised as prose. The Breakdown So Far, her latest collection of absurd short stories, is a minivan crammed full of weird.”
— Toronto Star

“[Farrant] manages to make these stories feel very whole and rounded, despite their brevity—no small task.”
— Herizons