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Distributed for Seagull Books

Mutants

Selected Essays

Distributed for Seagull Books

Mutants

Selected Essays

Toby Litt is best known for his “hip-lit” fiction, which, in its sharing of characters and themes across numerous stories and novels, has always taken an unusual, hybrid form. In Mutants, he applies his restless creativity to nonfiction. The book brings together twenty-six essays on a range of diverse topics, including writers and writing, and the technological world that informs and underpins it. Each essay is marked by Litt’s distinct voice, heedless of formal conventions and driven by a curiosity and a determination to give even the shortest piece enough conceptual heft to make it come alive. Taken as a whole, these pieces unexpectedly cohere into a manifesto of sorts, for a weirder, wilder, more willful fiction.

Praise for Toby Litt
“A genuinely individual talent with a positive relish for dealing with the contemporary aspects of the modern world.”—Scotsman

“Toby Litt is awfully good—he gives something new every time he writes.”—Muriel Spark

“He has invented a fresh, contemporary style—it will sing in the ears of this generation.”—Malcolm Bradbury

304 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2016

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory


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Reviews

“Addressed primarily to aspiring writers, Litt’s essays collected in Mutants both derogate conventional prose and point the way to alternatives. He offers the sort of advice you won’t get from editors and literary agents at writing conferences, neither groups of which can meet their interlocking quarterly profit goals if you are too independent of spirit and technique.”

On the Seawall

Table of Contents

What I think

Tolstoy and Gogol via Ricardo Lísias
Headfuck Fiction via Carlos Labbé
B. S. Johnson
Kafka
Ballard
Spark
Literature and Technology
Sensibility
Souls
Swing
Talking to Strangers
STORGY
QUANTUM prose MANIFESTO

How I Came to Think It

On Perversity
W. G. Sebald
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
On Monsters
On Ghost Stories
Reading
Writing
Film vs Fiction
Fame vs Genius
Against Historical Fiction
‘Here Is London, Giddy London’: Some Drawing Lessons From Hogarth
Writing Twenty-First-Century London
The Mays

Organisms
Acknowledgments 

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