Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys - Softcover

Self, Will

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140268642 ISBN 13: 9780140268645

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

Will Self's third collection of short stories takes his readers straight into the distorting hall-of-mirrors that is his fictional world. In one story a Londoner finds his house underpinned by an enormous rock of crack cocaine; in another, a misanthrope learns that flies have feelings.

"It delivers what its title promises ... This guy is a massive talent." Steve Grant, Time Out

"A superb new slice of contemporary Gothic." Independent on Sunday

About this title

Review:

Will Self's tabloid-friendly reputation as a connoisseur of proscribed substances should not obscure the fact that he can write many of his contemporaries under the table. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, is filled with typically Selfish confections: gritty chunks of reality wrapped in a sweet shell of exquisitely funny and intelligent writing. Admittedly, some of the stories here feel a little underdeveloped, as if the author were flexing his literary muscles and showing how easily he can make highbrow style dirty-dance with his lowbrow obsessions, but even the least of them is a bravura performance by an expert wordsmith. Self's obvious pleasure in bringing his extraordinary talents to bear on the seamiest of subjects is irresistible: the description of a crack cocaine rush that closes the first story, for example, is quite possibly more intoxicating than the drug itself.

But the greater part of the book complements that dazzling style with deeper pleasures. As he ranges from the hilarious tale of a remarkable infant who babbles in business German ("Bemess-bemess-bemessungsgrundlage!") to a troubled psychiatrist's journey toward the abyss, Self shows an uncanny knack for mixing realism and absurdity. The closing piece, a short novella about a wrongly convicted sex offender's attempt to win a short-story prize, is the most assured of all. In this author's hands, the barely articulate conversations of career criminals are transformed into poetry, and the struggles of the central character are both moving and wickedly funny:

In prison, in the English winter, the word crepuscular acquires new resonance, new intensity. For here and now is an eternity of forty-watt bulbs, an Empty Quarter of linoleum and a lost world of distempered walls. It's an environment of corridors and walkways, a space that taunts with the idea of progression towards arrival; then delivers only a TV room full of modular plastic chairs and Styrofoam beakers napalmed by fag ends.

In Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys Will Self shows once again that he's someone to be reckoned with. The kind of writer a society needs, he uses his wit as a crowbar to pry open the cracks in our culture. --Simon Leake

From the Back Cover:

'Self at his most nihilistic and funny; you'll laugh and flinch at the same time' Guardian

'Self has turned out an hilarious collection, with the requisite touch of disorientation. "Flytopia", the story about a man who suddenly finds flies more lovable than his girlfriend, follows the Kafkaesque line Self opened with his recent novel Great Apes - man as animal ... "Story for Europe", about a two-year-old north Londoner who suddenly starts speaking business German, is comic genius' Brenda Maddox, New Statesman

'When Will Self wants to step outside his cultivated amoral threshold and shock us into rage, the effect can be profound. This is Self's third short-story collection and like all the best books it delivers what its title promises ... an awesome London Dungeon of a collection ... Self is a massive talent' Time Out

'The master of discomfort, Self won't even let you take the generic cosiness of the short story collection for granted' Independent on Sunday

'Self has a voice: ironic, exaggerated, wised-up, amused. He has a powerful sense of place: the murkier streets of London ... where anything can happen ... And modernity is his urgent subject' The Times

'This funny, intelligent book is proof we should cherish him' Daily Mail

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140268642
• ISBN 13: 9780140268645
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256