11/21/2023 0 Comments Simon rich![]() The book is packed with laugh out loud moments and, sure, it’s a short read – not even 150 pages – but there are few better ways to spend an afternoon without taking your clothes off. Most of them revolve, as the full title suggests, around people stuck in difficult situations and how they cope with them, revealing a myriad facets of the human psyche, almost all of which are simply hilarious. These are not short stories, they are flash fiction, and yet using just a few hundred words at a time, Rich is capable to drumming up such drama and comedy that you long for there to be many, many more stories. I’d worried that maybe he’d started off not being quite so good, but, no, he’s been brilliant from the first moment.Ĭontaining fifty-seven separate narratives, it sounds daunting, but each is unique and expertly constructed, and none of them are more than three pages long. Given that this is his fourth appearance on my blog in just over two years (see also: What In God’s Name?, The Last Girlfriend On Earth and Spoiled Brats), it’s no surprise that he’s back here again and I’m talking him up once more.Īnt Farm and Other Desperate Situations, to give it its full title, is his first book, published when he was just twenty-three and is already full with all the humour and sheer genius that his later books also contained. If you loved yourself, you’d read Simon Rich, and that’s all there is to it. There’s not a single wasted word and I can guarantee that this book will make you feel a whole lot better and perhaps a bit less alone. The stories are cleverly crafted and terribly funny, epitomising the adage that “brevity is wit”. There’s not a whole lot else to say about this book, really. Two of the funniest – “Time Machine” and “Actor’s Nightmare” – are also among the shortest, but you’ll have to read them yourselves to see what I mean. A lot of them are simply lines of dialogue, but they’re all wonderfully smart and punchy.Īmong others you have a young Simon learning about the tooth fairy for the first time and wondering whether there is a face fairy too two frogs discussing the fact that they are killed and dissected for appalling crap science reports Batman arguing with the mayor of Gotham City for better prisons to stop the Joker escaping Count Dracula’s dating profile in which he attempts to prove he is a normal human God forgetting exactly what his big plan is what happens in the four years at acupuncture school and the horrific truth behind logic problems. ![]() Rarely is a story more than two pages long, some are merely three or four lines, but each one is a perfectly crafted joke and tells so much more than what is revealed. ![]() ![]() In this collection, we are treated to over fifty examples of sparkling flash fiction divided into the categories of “Growing Up”, “Going to Work”, “Daily Life”, “Relationships”, “Animals” and “God”. One of the finest, silliest writers working today, my blog is already liberally sprinkled with his work – Ant Farm and Spoiled Brats to name two – and every time I dip into one of his collections, I come out smiling. With this in mind, I now joyfully return to the mad mind of Simon Rich. As the news becomes more and more farcical, and I steadily lose the ability to comprehend what’s going on, I find that it’s better (in the short term, at least) so hide inside books.
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