Defying the commonly held perceptions of time and space, and escaping any easy classifications, Yasutaka Tsutsui’s stories centre on the folly of human desire. Most of his characters suffer awful fates as a result of their own foolishness, which usually takes the form of greed, lust or vanity. With influences as diverse as Darwin, Freud and the Marx Brothers, his writing displays a mixture of pathos, slapstick and psychological insight, shot through with bolts of Kafkaesque inventiveness.
Tsutsui’s quirky imagination, and his ability to construct new and striking realities, threaded with a dark-edged, menacing humour, make him a truly unique literary voice, and ensure that Salmonella Men on Planet Porno is hard to put down and impossible to forget.
'I'd very much like to see more of Tsutsui's work...It has that combination of lightness and meaning which Italo Calvino recommended and exemplified.'
Philip Hensher, The Daily Telegraph
'Imagine a manic J.G. Ballard, but one with an even darker past to work out.'
Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
'...each and every story sizzles with energy, teems with issues and sweeps you happily along into the fantasy.'
Miami Herald
'Science fiction and meta-fiction have a lot in common: Both are obsessed with showing the ways reality can be bent and layered. So it’s surprising that there aren’t more writers like Japan’s Yasatuka Tsutsui, a sci-fi novelist and meta-fiction pioneer who loves overlapping elements of fantasy and literary self-consciousness.'
Time Out New York
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Read an excerpt from
Salmonella Men On Planet Porno
Visit
Yasataka Tsutsui's website at
www.jali.or.jp
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