Reviews for The Day's Work

The average rating for The Day's Work based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-28 00:00:00 Kimberley Hunter Who says short story collections have to be 30% filler? Will Self hits eight consecutive balls out of the proverbial park with his third collection of short fiction, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys. Whether writing a story about two drug-dealing brothers who find a stratum of crack beneath their London flat; or about a pair of parents worrying over their child's mental development, oblivious to the fact that the gibberish Baby is spouting is actually fluent business German; or another about an alternate now where most adults are emotional wimps who need emotes - 12 foot tall mutants which share their owners genetic makeup - to coddle and pamper their pathetic little psyches; or another pair of stories, including the titular tale, which clinically recounts the slow descent of a boozy, womanizing psychoanalyst into emotional vacuity; or about a misanthropic work-at-homer who develops a symbiotic relationship with the bugs which infest his flat; or another about the horror of realizing how many people have the fucking name "David" - Self packs his stories with enough humor, incident, and his own strange approach to social commentary to keep you, dear reader, a happy reader. But the real prize pony in this collection is the novella "The Nonce Prize" which takes one of the drug dealers from the first story I mentioned, frames him for a horrific act of pedophilia and murder, and then locks him away in a prison where his only hope for a reprieve stems from whether or not he can beat his pedophiliac peers in a short story writing contest. Self's satire is vicious and on point in this collection, making Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys a wonderful place to start reading Self.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-04-18 00:00:00 Laura Lorena Torel A baby speaks in business German. A colony of flies forms an ecosystem in a stressed husband's loft. A pedophile wins a literary prize. What more could you want?