Victor Pelevin, the internationally fêted bad boy of Russian fiction, whose 1993 collection of short stories, The Blue Lantern, has this month been reissued in English (Faber, £6.99), has a new rival. And I don't mean Toby Litt, the John Calvin of the New Puritans, though the name of Jonson's Zeal-of-the-land Busy also comes to mind, what with Litt's latest 400-pager, deadkidsongs (Hamish Hamilton, £9.99) hitting the bookshops today, a mere 12 months after Corpsing came out. Litt, who has possibly the most suspiciously clever name for a novelist since Will Self, has been acclaimed by the Guardian as 'one of the foremost young lions of British hip-lit'. An unsportingly anonymous Londoner, by contrast, sticking their neck out on amazon.co.uk, described Corpsing as 'a waste of a perfectly good tree', adding: 'Penguin should be thoroughly ashamed of itself . . . If this is the future of Brit Lit, gawd help us all.'

LRB 22 February 2001 | PDF Download