Product Description

From the breakdown zones of the mediasphere and the margins of dance culture comes a selection of fifty stories, each one strange, telling, disturbing, or sometimes just plain weird: urban fairytales, instructions for lost machines, true confessions, word-dizzy roller-coasters, product recalls, adverts for mad gadgets, dub cut prose remixes. Throughout them all, Jeff Noon delights in the magical possibilities of language, creating a wholly new kind of storytelling. Ideas-per-page rating, dangerously close to the legal limit

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #367642 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 350 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"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

From the Back Cover
From the breakdown zones of the mediasphere and the margins of dance culture comes a selection of fifty stories, each one strange, telling, disturbing, or sometimes just plain weird: urban fairytales, instructions for lost machines, true confessions, word-dizzy roller-coasters, product recalls, adverts for mad gadgets, dub cut prose remixes. Throughout them all, Jeff Noon delights in the magical possibilities of language, creating a wholly new kind of storytelling.

Ideas-per-page rating, dangerously close to the legal limit.

About the Author
Jeff Noon
Acknowledged as one of the most exciting new authors today, Jeff Noon is the author of five novels: Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice, Nymphomation, and Needle in the Groove; and a collection of short stories, Pixel Juice. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1995.

Customer Reviews

Incredibly Original
50 short stories, each one revealing a new provocative or introspective idea. Noon's imagination is clearly quite incredible - I have never read a book with so many individual ideas. Noon also uses language in an entirely different way, the rhythm of his writing and the thoughts he conveys through his words are very powerful - the story might take only two minutes to read but it leaves you pondering the meaning or the moral. Jeff Noon has written a book which is incredible, an "off switch" for humans, swarming adverts, and the story of a young pimp who grows up. This is a great gift for someone 14+ who is interested in the human mind, and in culture and change.

Brilliantly Esoteric Short Stories
Jeff Noon is one of the most innovative and clever authors of modern science fiction. He subverts and reinvents the conventions of the genre, and injects a lot of urban weirdness. Pixel Juice is his first and so far only collection of short stories, and he's excelled. Almost every one of these 50 stories (it's a lot, but they're mostly very short) has one or more bizarre ideas at its core, and it's a pleasure discovering the contents of Jeff Noon's mind. Noon veers between simple narrative, anecdote, limerick sequences, newspaper article, cybernetic dog-slang, haiku, rap, and any number of other styles. He's impossible to pin down, and you wouldn't want to. Ideas like the vurt feather or the domino lottery have been expanded to entire books, but here's all the ephemera that wouldn't fill a novel, but work brilliantly in just a story. Pixel Juice is excellent.

....and now for Something Completely Different....
There's no denying, "Pixel Juice" is a complete trip of a read, from start to finish. Whether that's your sort of thing or not is another matter.

"Pixel Juice" is a collection of 50 stories/poems/game instructions/dictionary definitions, all concocted and set in an alternative futuristic Manchester, but all with a slight twist of the fabric of reality. Typical elements of some of the stories include people with moons growing in their stomachs, technologies able to recreate lost celebrities through the strength of their charisma, mirrors that reflect other peoples' images, killer adverts and lots more psychadelic, thechnophallic and kaliedacelic creations all await the reader.

Anyone who has enjoyed Noons previous works will not be disappointed. The vurtual world of feather suckers and DJs is revisited, there are several wordplays and nifty puns, and some truly great Noonesque stories in here. My only disappointment is that some of the stories end too abruptly, or at just the point where the reader is expecting a denoumemnt. Sometimes one is offered. Sometimes, however, one is lacking, or only appears vaguely in another chapter which begs more questions than it answers. However, the writing style is sharp and varied, and the stories within themselves are still satisfying.

To the uninitiated, "Pixel Juice" may seem confusing, irritating, absurd or unsatisfying in some places, but avid readers are likely to find a few gems hidden amid the confusing tales. It's not a good starting point for Noon, but whether they're a first timer to this author or a die hard fan, the experience of reading "Pixel Juice" is a bit like a legal literary high. Ingenious!