Ever been left spluttering over some fatuous fib trying to pass itself off as information, even as fact? Of course you have. We all have. It's bullshit, and as Laura Penny sees it, we're drowning in the stuff. Your Call Is Important to Us is Penny's brilliant take on the "all-you-can-eat buffet of phoniness" that is our lives today.

"We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production," Penny says. While bullshit is not new, more money, more media, and more people at mics have led to a bullshit pandemic. Today, we are so used to exaggeration and obfuscation we rarely notice them any more.Thank goodness we have Penny as our witty, smart-aleck guide through the phoniness of advertising and public relations, the claptrap of big pharma, the gobbledygook of the media, and the poppycock of the service industry. Along the way, Penny takes direct aim at the major culprits and the insidious ways they distort reality.

As scathing as Michael Moore, as incisive as Naomi Klein, and as funny as Al Franken, Penny's take on the bullshit factor in modern life is a page-turner. Penny has a cheeky riff on that revealing question: "If my call is so important," she asks, "why doesn't anyone answer the damn phone?"

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"Penny takes aim with machine-gun prose and furious wit . . . A Naomi Klein for cranky people with a sense of humour."
— Globe and Mail

"Delightful. . . . A Canadian country cousin to Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."
— Winnipeg Free Press

"Put Penny's slim but venomous diatribe . . . at the top of your must-read list."
— USA Today

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Laura Penny has toiled as a bookstore clerk, a student activist, a union organizer, and a university instructor. She currently works as a teaching fellow in the acclaimed Foundation Year Program at the University of King's College in Halifax. Her writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail the ,National Post ,Saturday Night and ,Toronto Life where she is contributing editor. This is her first book.,

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