I Like Being Killed: Stories

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.