I Like Being Killed: Stories

by Tibor Fischer

Overview

Fiendishly funny and dark, here is a Canterbury Tales for the millennium, a vision of the New Europe where the young and bright live ultra-hip lives of noisy desperation

Tibor Fischer has been called "a Joseph Conrad with jokes" (The Sunday Times, London). Now he earns the title again with a story collection that ranges from the blackest, high-voltage humor to sober and moving pessimism about the sorry condition of humans at the new millennium.

Here are those left behind by the vacuous nineties: a failed software designer who cannot connect with others, a failed artist, a failed cowboy, a failed solicitor-seducer, a bookseller primed for failure as he tries to read every book in the world, and a venomous stand-up comedienne who has fallen from grace. From London to the French Riviera, from Hamburg to Romania, in the new Europe only the ruthless succeed: the weak are cowed by the strong, the rich fleece the poor, and the ugly is bested by the surgically enhanced.

Reveling in the absurdities of his characters' predicament's, Fischer rescues them from a relentlessly dark fate. Laced with exuberant narrative and matchless comic invention, I Like Being Killed reveals the struggle of intelligence to make sense of our twentry-first century world.

This book was also published under the title Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627795975
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/05/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	564 KB

About the Author

Tibor Fischer was born in Stockport, England, in 1959, the son of Hungarian basketball champions. He is a journalist, TV documentarian, and author of three novels, Under the Frog (a Booker Prize finalist), The Thought Gang, and The Collector Collector.

Tibor Fischer was born in Stockport, England, in 1959. He is the author of three novels, Under the Frog (a Booker Prize finalist), The Thought Gang, and The Collector Collector. Don’t Read This Book if You’re Stupid is his first collection of stories. He lives in London

Table of Contents

	We Ate the Chef	3
	Portrait of the Artist as a Foaming Deathmonger	95
	Fifty Uselessnesses	119
	Then They Say You're Drunk	133
	Ice Tonight in the Hearts of Young Visitors	157
	Bookcruncher	165
	I Like Being Killed	183

Editorial Reviews

Fischer writes well, with a clean, wry style and a keen ear for the catchy rhythms that often propel the most casual conversations.
— Washington Post

Jabari Asim

Sharply drawn and often cruel, much-heralded novelist Fischer's first book of short fiction presents a gallery of cynical, angry eccentrics. Some of his desperate, wisecracking English protagonists seize on oddball projects to shape their lives; others are just desperate for cash or sex, or even a comfy place to spend the night. Fischer (Under the Frog; The Collector Collector) offers two novellas and five short stories. The first and longest, "We Ate the Chef," follows resentful, penurious Jim--a former rock band manager, now a failing Internet businessman--as he joins rich acquaintances on the French Riviera. Their hijinks finally let Jim test his "theory that blondes had better breasts than brunettes." Fischer's shorter work is stranger and better. "Portrait of the Artist as a Foaming Deathmonger" starts off as an ebullient killer's tale of his exploits; neither the man nor his trade are what they seem. "Bookcruncher" gives us a well-educated Englishman adrift in New York on a lonely lifetime mission. "Then They Say You're Drunk" surveys the petty criminals and pub drunks of an urban neighborhood "painfully short of warm, goodwill-like emotions" through the eyes of its quick-tempered narrator. The title novella describes a few days in the life of Miranda Piano, a London stand-up comedian who "lived for cock." A failed benefit concert and a surprising trip to Scotland give Miranda the energy to do what she's always wanted to do to her trusting boyfriend. It's hard to call Fischer's work satire, because he provides so little to balance his characters' cynicism; his crisp prose suits those characters perfectly. His stories belong in the abrasive tradition of British comic-novel mayhem, somewhere between Will Self and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim; readers who find those authors compelling ought to give Fischer a try. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

An air of menace permeates this collection of imaginatively titled stories about thirtysomething Brits who either want what they can't have or get what they don't want. From the impressive opener, "We Ate the Chef," in which Jim, a web site designer, travels to Nice for his first holiday in eight years craving nothing more than sleep, to the final story about Miranda, a comedienne who aims to leave her audiences miserable, the writing dazzles. In between, there is Guy, in "Then They Say You're Drunk," a solicitor's representative whose lot it is to have a caseload of inept criminals who practically beg to be apprehended, and the wonderful "Bookcruncher," a man who devotes himself to the Herculean task of reading everything ever written by spending all his days and nights in libraries and bookstores, graduating from his university library at Cambridge and moving on to the likes of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. This fresh and bleakly funny collection is highly recommended for public libraries.--Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

Not as compulsively clever as his last novel (The Collector Collector, 1997), these seven stories wear their millennial cynicism heavily. Fischer seems to have substituted world-weariness and sarcasm for wit and wordplay. All of Fischer's unhappy protagonists are either failures or hopeless wannabes on the verge of giving up: in the novella-length "We Ate the Chef," a burnt-out Webhead takes a last-ditch holiday he can't afford with people he doesn't much like (including, by surprise, a successful competitor), and discovers the depth of his disconnect. The failed software designer, like the story itself, peters out in bed with a sexy young Russian girl who doesn't excite the jaded entrepreneur. In the equally long title piece, a female standup comic, who professes to "live for cock," finds little consolation even in sex as her career nose-dives: she climbs Nelson's Column naked to little notice, and a benefit for two jailed Burmese comics draws a tiny audience. Her sense of evil in the world is matched only by the journalist in "Ice Tonight in the Hearts of Young Visitors," who witnesses genuine horror and chaos during the fall of Ceausescu in Romania. The nastiest of Fischer's bilious characters is a solicitor's rep (and aspiring actor) who mocks his dim, lowlife clients, and loathes his racially mixed Brixton neighborhood. A would-be gunslinger in "Fifty Uselessnesses" can't hold a job, and no longer gets bookings for his cowboy routine, so he stage-manages his own death-by-shootout. Two more comic pieces—one about a desperate artist who'll do anything to get attention, the other about a fellow whogetshimself locked in bookstores at night—rely on one-joke ideas that never develop. The cheeky titles that seldom mean much are typical of Fischer's attempt to dazzle: the writing here is darker than in his earlier work, and never rises above its easily earned despair.

Kirkus Reviews