Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid: Stories - Softcover

Fischer, Tibor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312278527 ISBN 13: 9780312278526

Publisher: Picador USA, 2001

Synopsis

A collection of inventive, hilarious, and utterly contemporary tales offers a vision of the new Europe and the desperate lives of fashionable youth, a world where the slow, sensitive, and weak are exploited or simply left in the dust. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

If there's one thing Tibor Fischer can do like no-one else, it's to pen snappy, devastating titles. Once you've got past the provocative posturing of this collection's title page, then you're faced with seven brilliantly dubbed pieces--try "We Ate The Chef", "Portrait of the Artist as a Foaming Deathmonger" and "I Like Being Killed" for size.

As all that might suggest, Fischer--known for his Booker-shortlisted Under The Frog and more recently The Thought Gang and The Collector Collector--is a clever writer, a wordsmith of tremendous dexterity, whose fluent prose surges forward with an irrepressible energy, usually pushing him to the furthest edges of a very dark humour and occasionally to a jarring callousness.

The opening novella "We Ate The Chef", for example, starts innocuously enough in Cambridge Circus, but somehow spirals into a Côte d'Azur thriller, climaxing in a particularly ungracious (but utterly appropriate) orgasm. In "Then They Say You're Drunk", Fischer, an adopted South Londoner, explores the quite plausible proposition that Brixton "must have more headcases per square inch than any other place in the world." His trademark stream-of-self-consciousness shares much with the rhythms of stand-up, so it comes as no surprise to find the closing "I Like Being Killed" delving into London's comedy circuit.

But there's a hint of seriousness among the casual cruelty. In the short "Ice Tonight in the Hearts of Young Visitors", Fischer stands on the Hungarian border and concludes bitterly: "I assure you if there is a hell, it will be the most solitary of confinements and cold." --Alan Stewart

Review

"A stylish, slickly readable, frequently schoolboyish, now and then absurd comic bagatelle which also manages, somehow or other, to be worldly wise, subversive, and not a little creepy" (Henry Hitchings Independent)

"One of the funniest literary intellects" (Steven Poole The Guardian)

"Tibor Fischer is the Ali G of literature..... Perhaps the best tribute to Fischer is that he is one of the handful of authors of whom one asks in hopeful anticipation what he or she is going to do next." (George Walden New Statesman)

"Sly and full of thirtysomething angst. Although stepping into Fischer's world may be a dark and cynical thrill, a thrill it is" (Booklist)

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312278527
• ISBN 13: 9780312278526
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 261