Brian Fawcett

Brian Fawcett (1944-2022) is a founding co-editor of dooneyscafe.com. He's the author of many books, including "Cambodia: A book for people who find television too slow" (1986), "Gender Wars" (1994), "Virtual Clearcut, or The Way Things Are in My Hometown" (2003), "Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney's Cafe and other Non-Globalized People, Places, and Ideas" (2003) and "Human Happiness" (2011).

The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars (Ch. 4): Concentration, and Testicles

By Brian Fawcett / 2023 March 19
Posted in ,,,

Brian Fawcett learns about the gory details of life on the farm. Ch. 4 of “The Sussex Variations.”

Read More

The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars (Ch. 3): Females and Males

By Brian Fawcett / 2023 March 13
Posted in ,,,

Brian Fawcett learns about males and females, both human and porcine, on a pig farm in Sussex, England in the early 1960s.

Read More

The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars (Ch. 2): Stress, Distress, and the Sussex Downs

By Brian Fawcett / 2023 March 5
Posted in ,,,

Brian Fawcett’s “Sussex Variations, or Two Boars,” Ch. 2. People feel distress. So do pigs. Living and learning on an English farm.

Read More

The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars (Ch. 1): Luck, Generosity and the Rules

By Brian Fawcett / 2023 February 27
Posted in ,,,

Brian Fawcett, age 18, from northern British Columbia, arrives at his uncle’s and aunt’s pig farm in Sussex, England, and comes-of-age as two 400-pound boars charge into battle.

Read More

The trouble with Stanley Tucci’s Taste (and the right way to make tomato sauce)

By Brian Fawcett / 2022 March 2
Posted in ,,

Brian Fawcett on how to make Euclid Avenue Tomato Sauce. Everything you need to know to get it right.

Read More

RIP Gerard F. Farry

By Brian Fawcett / 2021 October 24
Posted in ,

In mid-January of this year, 2021, Gerard Farry died in Vancouver at the age of 92. He wasn’t the sort of man who’d naturally be familiar to the readers of this website; he had been the director of urban planning for Greater Vancouver during the 1970s and 1980s, which was the heyday of urban master…

Read More

Book Publishing, Bookselling, George Bowering, and the new censorship

By Brian Fawcett / 2021 January 13
Posted in ,,

        I read George Bowering’s latest book, Writing and Reading (New Star, Vancouver, 2019), in a single sitting, which was unique in my experience of reading him. Bowering can be demanding and occasionally hermetic, and therefore requires intense concentration. But Writing and Reading was like having a conversation with George at a…

Read More

The (Good) Trouble With David Shields

By Brian Fawcett / 2020 August 20
Posted in ,

David Shields’ The Trouble with Men. It ain’t self-help, says Brian Fawcett.

Read More
Laszlo F. Foldenyi

A moment With Dostoyevsky, James Wood, and an obscure Hungarian Writer

By Brian Fawcett / 2020 August 6
Posted in ,

Brian Fawcett recalls something he discovers about how Dostoyevsky wrote dialogue that leads him to take a swing at James Wood, (the critic, not the actor)

Read More

Norm Sibum and the Poetry of “Flaneurism”

By Brian Fawcett / 2020 July 21
Posted in ,

Brian Fawcett reads Norm Sibum’s new volume of verse. He thinks Sibum is a skilled poet, but….

Read More