will-self.com » 2008

I have mixed feelings about the threatened closure of the Colony Room Club in Soho, which comes in the same week that a major exhibition of its most famous member — Francis Bacon — opens at Tate Britain.

As a naïve 18-year-old, I was inducted by my late friend Ben Trainin — one of the barmen — into the Colony’s atmosphere of Forties acerbity. My liberal and suburban sensibilities were at once appalled and enthralled by the Colony. It seemed a grubby little room to have been the cockpit of a social revolution — and yet this was undoubtedly the case.

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Evening Standard, Journalism | No Comments »

Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

Posted by Chris H on September 12th, 2008

Will’s new book, Liver, has just been published by Penguin.

Miscellaneous | No Comments »

Imagination and the city

Posted by Chris H on September 5th, 2008

Listen to Will speaking on Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed programme: “Laurie Taylor discusses how reality and fantasy combine to create our experience of the modern city. He is joined by the novelist Will Self, the sociologist Richard Sennett and the geographer Doreen Massey in the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House.”

Radio and Audio | No Comments »

Liver

Posted by Chris M on September 4th, 2008

Liver – Will Self

See all books by Will Self at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Synopsis:
These remarkable new pieces from Will Self each feature the largest of our internal organs: the liver, in varying states of disease and decay. In “Foie Humane” we go inside a Soho drinking club, the denizens of which live in a highly stylised yet emotionally dead state of excess. “Prometheus” tells the story of a dazzlingly successful advertising copywriter who can sell anything to anyone at any time. But things go wrong when he meets Zeus, a bigshot entrepreneur with a beautiful and manipulative wife. Tony Phillips’ subterranean Kensington flat is the setting for “Birdy Num Num,” where obsessives spend their days in a crepuscular realm of cocaine and heroin. Finally, in “Leberknodel’, a terminal liver cancer patient travels to Zurich to commit assisted suicide. When she arrives, however, the cancer mysteriously goes into remission.

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Will’s secret London sanctuary

Posted by Chris H on September 2nd, 2008

“Some people may say toujours Provence, but having just got back from the South of France, I re-immersed myself in London like a baby swimming into a birthing pool. We went to get the puppy from his very kind dogsitters in Shoreditch, then walked home via Bunhill Fields, London Wall, St Paul’s and the South Bank. Where in the world could you get such astonishing contrasts of people, of architecture, and of different senses of deep time? In Bunhill Fields we paid homage to Blake and Defoe, then, walking down towards the Barbican, I noticed through some plate glass doors belonging to the City University the viridian square of a cricket pitch. Who would have imagined that such a space would be given over to sport in the costliest square mile on earth? A perfect London moment indeed.”

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