The Days
Forecasts, Warnings, Advice
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Farrant's compendium of 93 pieces of microfiction with a poetic feel (following The World Afloat: Miniatures) is a beguiling, quirky delight. The forecasts, warnings, and advice of the subtitle offer sly and raucous humor about seemingly random topics; tongue-in-cheek insights into marriage, parenting, and aging; pleasantly surreal tableaus of subjects such as hearse driving; and a three-page list of items an unnamed woman would not want, including "mom shorts" and "a bitchy resting face." Ever-whimsical and confidently left-field, Farrant also celebrates obscure commemorative days; Dorothy Parker Day is "the one day of the year we can say corrosive things and be free from public censure." Providing serial weirdness in miniature, the pieces bounce with erratic amiability through forecasts, such as "hair will be styled for its hypnotic value"; a history of a kitchen sink; and "Today's Mystery," which imagines in four lines a two-person conversation about Banksy's graffiti artworks. 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 and impress with their steady devotion to the absurdity of daily life. A tilted or askew vision operates throughout and takes readers to unexpected but rewarding places.