Books by Toby Litt

A Writer''s Diary is a novel that blends fact and fiction, invention and memoir with joyful creativity and remarkable literary ambition. In it, Toby Litt takes on some of the biggest questions of life and death, not to mention literary as well as human mortality and the steady march of time. At first, A Writer''s Diary appears to be exactly what it claims to be. It is a daily summary of the events in a person called Toby Litt''s life: his thoughts on creating literature, his concerns for his family and the people he teaches, his musings on the various things that catch his attention around his desk and his immediate surroundings... But as it progresses, questions start to arise. Is this fact? Or is it fiction? (And if it''s both, which is which?) Is this a book about quotidian daily routines - one person''s days as they unspool - or is something more going on? Is there something even larger taking shape? ... And so, seemingly by magic, an increasingly urgent narrative starts to build - a

Elliott is something of a genius. More than that, Elliott is an ideal friend, and to know him is to adore him. But few people do know Elliott, because he is also stuck. He lives in a wheelchair in an orphanage. It''s 1979. Elliott is forced to spend his days in an empty corridor, either gazing out of the window at the birds in a tree or staring into a white wall wherever the Catholic Sisters who run the ward have decided to park him. So when Jim, blind and mute but also headstrong, arrives on the ward and begins to defy the Sisters'' restrictive rules, Elliott finally sees a chance for escape.

Toby Litt is one of that rare breed of fiction writers who never writes the same book twice: every time out, he takes an unexpected new tack--and his readers happily follow. ​Told in the form of the pithy, even lyrical advice a young soldier leaves behind after a mission gone wrong, Notes for a Young Gentleman is no exception. Its brilliantly creative form, and the epigrammatic genius Litt displays in its creation, nonetheless can't hide the powerful, emotional story at its heart: of a young soldier parachuting toward a beautiful, moonlit country house on a mission . . . of betrayal. The house? Marlborough. The target? Winston Churchill, an old friend of his father. A brilliant, at times dizzying but always heartfelt exploration of love, revenge, and the essence of a gentleman, Notes for a Young Gentleman is classic Toby Litt: wholly new and wholly unforgettable.

Toby Litt is best known for his hip-lit fiction, which, in its sharing of characters and themes across numerous stories and novels, has always taken an unusual, hybrid form. In Mutants, he applies his restless creativity to nonfiction. The book brings together twenty-six essays on a range of diverse topics, including writers and writing, and the technological world that informs and underpins it. Each essay is marked by Litts distinct voice, heedless of formal conventions and driven by a curiosity and a determination to give even the shortest piece enough conceptual heft to make it come alive. Taken as a whole, these pieces unexpectedly cohere into a manifesto of sorts, for a weirder, wilder, more willful fiction.

A collection of short stories that is about our globalizing and atomizing world - with stories set in India, Sweden, Australia, and Iran - that also looks at how we meet and fail to meet and what connects us to one another, as well as waste and communication, and, in turn, communication through waste.