Here at www.will-self.com, we’re running a Q&A with Will to coincide with the publication of The Butt, which we’ll publish on the site and at Bloomsbury’s too. Simply email your questions to info@will-self.com and we’ll put the best of them to him. The deadline for sending in your questions is April 14.
Yes, it’s competition time again, to celebrate the publication of Will’s new novel, The Butt.
Will has kindly offered one of his very own copies of his first ever published work, a collection of cartoons he did for the New Statesman, Slump, as first prize (the winner will receive a copy of The Butt too). There were very limited numbers of the paperback book published by Virgin in 1985, and it remains one of the most collectable of Will’s books. Bloomsbury has also kindly offered nine more copies of The Butt as runners-up prizes.
Read Will’s Evening Standard column of 18.03.08 here
The Guardian has one of the first interviews with Will to coincide with the publication of his new novel, The Butt.
Lowland Scotland is networked with motorways - many of them astonishingly empty. Where my mother-in-law lives, in Motherwell, you can get in the jamjar, and within an hour be in Stirling Castle, or Edinburgh Castle, or clambering up the natural fortification of Ben Lomond. So, you can be forgiven for thinking of the entire statelet as a series of arbitrarily interchangeable visitor attractions. We were zooming up to Stirling when I saw the sign for the Falkirk Wheel. We’d been meaning to go on the Wheel for yonks, but somehow hadn’t got round to it. Boom-boom. Now seemed like the right time: the day was as bright as a political theorist who’s just solved the West Lothian question, and the views - I felt confident - would be superb. I diverted on to another empty motorway and drove straight into a filthy fogbank. Still, even if the prospects had dimmed there was still the miracle of engineering itself for us to admire.
To find out where Will is going to be giving readings and attending events on his promotional tour of The Butt, to be published April 7 by Bloomsbury, visit Will’s author page at Bloomsbury’s website.
On the train to Cambridge, I took a call from a nice-sounding young woman at the Financial Times. She was to ask me questions for a questionnaire in her newspaper. I’d forgotten she was calling, and found myself temporarily discombobulated, ie when the questions began, their absurdity hit me like a freight train. ‘What is your favourite book?’ ‘Who is your literary inspiration?’ All that sort of reductive guff that puffs up the pages of prints too poor to source reporting anymore.
It’s a bit like Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour, except that I’m not Bob Dylan and I haven’t done any adverts for Victoria’s Secret. (Actually, what is Victoria’s secret, that she has breasts and a vagina…? I only ask.) The closest I’ve ever been to Dylan’s birthplace of Hibbing, Minnesota, is Madison, Wisconsin. I was there the week the USAF was dropping ‘daisy-cutters’ on the Tora Bora caves - remember that? The city, like many US state capitals, is dominated by its Capitol, a scale model of the one in Washington. On my way to the bookstore to read to three orthodontically challenged Midwestern teenagers, I saw a flyer on reception advertising ‘Tonight at Civic Centre, Bob Dylon and his Band’. ‘Bob Dylon?’ I queried the girl on the desk, ‘don’t you mean Bob Dylan?’
Will is going to be making an appearance at the Aye Write! festival in Glasgow on March 15 at 6.30pm to talk about his forthcoming novel, The Butt.
The Prime Minister has uttered two cheers for 24-hour drinking. Yes, there will be a crackdown on premises flogging booze to underage drinkers, and yes, there will be a campaign to persuade us not to damage our health and looks, but overall the Government feels the more liberal drinking regime is by no means a disaster.
Not so, claims the Local Government Association. Its head, Sir Simon Milton of Westminster Council, believes the liberalisation has been a disaster, with town centres becoming no-go areas, full of berserker teens, their chests daubed with lager: violent crime has increased by 25 per cent between 3am and 6am in the morning. The statistic the Government prefers is that there has been a three per cent reduction in crime since the citizenry were able to spread out their imbibing.
 The Book Of Dave More info |
 Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe More info |
 Dorian More info |
 Feeding Frenzy More info |
 How The Dead Live More info |
 Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys More info |
 Great Apes More info |
 Cock And Bull More info |
 Grey Area More info |
 Junk Mail More info |
 My Idea Of Fun More info |
 The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis More info |
 The Quantity Theory Of Insanity More info |
 Sore Sites More info |
 Perfidious Man More info |
 William Burroughs - Junky [with essay by WS] More info |
 Alasdair Gray - Critical Essays [with essay by WS] More info |
