In demystifying the complex world of grammar, Tom Disch and Dave Morice have constructed a wonderful new entertainment stimulated by many of the rules of the English language. The engaging verbal and visual wit of the Disch/Morice duo amuses as it informs, appealing to both the grammatically challenged and the rare soul who delights in diagramming dense sentences. Disch's playful verses lead us to see anew rules long forgotten or never fully understood, while Morice's comic treatments flesh out the dry, chalky terrain of pronouns, tenses, infinitives, and prepositions. A perfect gift for anyone needing introduction, or reintroduction, to the rules of the verbal road, and for those who enjoy the clever play of word and image. .
Author
Poet and cynic, Thomas M. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him; both are stunningly original books and both are among sf's more accomplishedly bitter-sweet works. In recent years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances—what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical. Thomas M. Disch committed suicide by gunshot on July 4, 2008.
