Aaron's Book of the Week :: Fun with Your New Head by Thomas M. Disch

Continuing our tribute to Thomas M. Disch, his collection Fun with Your New Head was the Book of Last Week. (I didn't get around to it last week, but I can't just let everything slide because we have to finish our Disch tribute before the Hugo Awards are announced August 9.)

This is the 1972 first paperback printing of Fun with Your New Head, cover art by Gene Szafran. Disch was a prolific author of short fiction early in his career, and Fun with Your New Head was Disch's second collection of short fiction, appearing just after One Hundred and Two H-Bombs and shortly before White Fang Goes Dingo, Getting Into Death, and The Man Who Had No Idea -- and doncha love these titles? (Never mind that Fun with Your New Head first appeared in England under the humdrum title Under Compulsion.) Fun with Your New Head contains some of Disch's most memorable short fiction, such as "Descending," in which a department store escalator only goes down . . . and down and down and down, and "The Roaches," a rather darker version of the scene in the film Enchanted where the princess magically summons help from some cockroaches.

The Book of This Week will be a signed copy of one of Disch's early novels.