Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys by Will Self

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a new collection of corkscrewed tales from the author of Great Apes. Self's world is a no-funhouse of warped mirrors. A man is seduced into a misanthropically charged symbiosis with the insects infesting his cottage - he has entered "Flytopia." In "A Story for Europe," a two-year-old English child utters his first, halting words . . . in business German. In "Caring, Sharing," status-conscious New Yorkers navigate the perils of dating along with their very literal "inner children." In "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz," a black Londoner discovers an enormous rock of crack cocaine underpinning his house - and quickly turns it into an efficient little empire. In the title story a psychoanalyst strips away all the sangfroid of his professionalism to find beneath . . . precisely nothing. And in the short novella "The Nonce Prize," a man framed for a sex crime he didn't commit finds that his only way out is to win a short-story competition.