Will Self is going to be reading from The Butt, out now in paperback,
at the Roundhouse in Camden on Tuesday May 12 at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £6.
Here is the Observer’s review of the show, and a couple of bloggers’ too, here and here.
Monthly Archives: May 2009
In defence of London
“An American travel website is warning travellers off our fair city on the grounds that it’s ‘dirty’ and the cuisine isn’t all it might be. While it isn’t usually my style to enter this sort of fray – I am, after all, a dual citizen – I feel I must speak out.
“I know I’m not alone in thinking that the boom years led London to have a somewhat bloated self-image: we began to think in terms of the City traders’ bunce; if we were property-owners, we fell prey to the delusion that money in bricks and mortar was also cash in the bank; we ignored the widening gulf between rich and poor.
Daphne du Maurier festival
Will Self will be appearing at the Daphne du Maurier festival, Fowey, Cornwall next Friday, May 15. Visit their website for details.
The pygmies fighting for Gordon’s job
“If there’s any drawback to political schadenfreude I’ve yet to discover what it is, and while pessimism may not make you popular it sure as hell means you’re likely to be right more often than those who, following Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
“So, we come to Gordon Brown, who, for years in advance of his ascent to the highest office in the land, I was stigmatising as the Anthony Eden de nos jours.
The Spirit of Jura
Piece in the Times in which Will Self is interviewed about The Spirit of Jura, a new anthology celebrating the island where Orwell wrote 1984 and Animal Farm to which Self has contributed – he spent a month at the Distillery Lodge there in 2007 writing this specially commissioned story.
‘I’m always that wordy bastard and Martin’s the great high stylist’
Interview with Will Self in the Eastern Daily Press last month.