In his first book of short stories, Tibor Fischer examines the lives of loners and failures. With both wit and sobriety, he depicts the trials of a Web site salesman who cannot connect with others, an artist whose career is going nowhere, a failed cowboy, a has-been solicitor, and a stand-up comedienne who has fallen from grace. Laced with exuberant narrative and matchless comic invention, "I Like Being Killed "reveals the struggle of intelligence to make sense of our modern world.

Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid

Literature & Fiction

Fischer, Tibor

Contemporary

Vintage/Ebury (a Division of R

Entertaining and often dazzling, this is Tibor Fischer’s second novel. Under the Frog won the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.A black comedy in the grand tradition of word-drunk intellectuals-en-dementia, The Thought Gang follows the larcenous adventures of blackout alcoholic philosopher Eddie Coffin who, in the wake of scandal, flees his professorship in England to begin the next logical step in his career: robbery. Coffin and his new partner in crime and metaphysics, Hubert the one-armed robber, roadtrip across the Continent in a spree of crime and epistemology, arguing a cracked history of Western philosophy and plumbing the meaning of life.

The Thought Gang

Vintage Books

In his first book of short stories, Tibor Fischer examines the lives of loners and failures. With both wit and sobriety, he depicts the trials of a Web site salesman who cannot connect with others, an artist whose career is going nowhere, a failed cowboy, a has-been solicitor, and a stand-up comedienne who has fallen from grace. Laced with exuberant narrative and matchless comic invention, I Like Being Killed reveals the struggle of intelligence to make sense of our modern world.

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

Picador

Paperback re-issue of Tibor Fischer's critically acclaimed first novel

Under the Frog: A Novel

Humor & Satire

Collector Collector

RANDOM HOUSE UK

A series of humourous short stories starting in misery and dropping towards despair. One character has a quest to read every book ever written in English, devouring them two at a time. The aphoristic tales are sandwiched between two novellas and deliver an apocalyptic vision with a grim smile.

Don't Read this Book if You're Stupid

Secker Warburg

In this wacky philosophical caper, washed-up, middle-aged British philosopher Eddie Coffin flees scandal and ruin at home to find himself destitute in France. There he hooks up with Hubert, a one-armed armed robber recently released from prison, and the "thought gang" is born. Applying philosophy to larceny, this unlikely duo winds its way from Montpellier to Toulon, robbing banks and exploring the meaning of life, in one of the most irreverent and ingenious novels of our time.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Scribner

Oceane (conceived on a cross-Channel ferry) doesn't get out much. But then there's a lot you can do in your room. Voyage to the End of the Room is Tibor Fischer on top form - funny, provocative, foul-mouthed, ingenious, thoughtful, touching and completely original. Narrated by a woman who is equally funny, provocative, etc, on the surface it's a novel about a failed dancer turned computer-graphics designer who's been around the block but these days doesn't leave her house. At heart, though, it's a meditation on how and whether you can ever know other people, what is evil, what is reality, what is humanity - and can you fake them? Or is there a litmus test for the real thing? Reality constantly bumps up against virtual reality, as the novel pans around the globe from Brixton to the holiday island of Chuuk by way of Barcelona, the Balkans and the Humber Estuary, introducing a fantastical cast of irresistible characters and their stories - from sad whores and pseudo-travel agents in Lambeth to perfectly formed sexworkers and 'wetwork' specialists in the Club Babylon, a Spanish tower of Babel where our heroine used to work and bizarre deaths kept occurring; and from a scrupulously devious debt collector to mercenaries and other hard men in former Yugoslavia. There's a brilliant twist that jolts the whole novel into perspective, when Oceane starts getting letters from a friend who's been dead for 15 years, and is drawn into a mystery whose answer might, or might not, be found as far away as Micronesia. Voyage to the End of the Room should come with a health warning ('This book could seriously mess with your mind') - and it may very well be addictive.

Voyage to the End of the Room

Vintage, UK

The Hungarians have an expression for the worst place in the world to be: “Under the frog’s ass down a coal mine.”Under the Frog, Tibor Fischer’s brilliant recreation of postwar Eastern Europe, was the surprise literary success of London, where it won the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is the very witty and very sad account of two young men who survive the chaos of communism as part of a traveling basketball team in pursuit of sex and the avoidance of work.Exuberant and energetic, Tibor Fischer’s first novel is a fascinating and oblique commentary on everyday life during those dramatic years. Fischer writes with the verve and irreverence of Martin Amis, but the world he recreates is one we know from George Konrad and Milan Kundera.

Under the frog (Fiction Series)

Polygon

Some foxing to the top edge of the pages. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

The Thought Gang (Fiction)

Edinburgh University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fischer, Tibor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fischer, Tibor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fischer, Tibor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid

The Thought Gang

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

Under the Frog: A Novel

Collector Collector

Don't Read this Book if You're Stupid

The Thought Gang

Voyage to the End of the Room

Under the frog (Fiction Series)

The Thought Gang (Fiction)