Showing Pixel Juice by Jeff Noon

"In the first shop they bought a packet of dogseed, because Doreen had always wanted to grow her own dog". Here we go again with Jeff Noon's own highly idiosyncratic approach to life, technology, England and literature. After four novels--Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice and Nymphomation--Noon has now assembled over 50 fragmentary stories (although the word "story" does not give anything like an accurate representation of these charged pieces of imaginative mayhem) that skip around from adverts to fairy tales, from weirdly rough-cut poetry to highly unorthodox board games. "For my seventh birthday I asked my dad to steal us a bike" asks the splendidly unsentimental narrator of Pixel Face. "I can't locate that shit", replies the hassled father, "How about a new computer?" "I tell him I've got two already", replies the charming son, "and if he doesn't deliver the bike, I'm telling the cops about him". All you need to know about the mores and morality of the future is in this book. --Nick Wroe