Will Self: Books

Walking to Hollywood: paperback of the year

Posted on by

The Independent has given Walking to Hollywood five stars in its paperbacks of 2011:

“The three essays collected in Walking to Hollywood are non-fictional travelogues that spiral slowly into abstraction, similar in many ways to the ‘psychogeography’ columns on which Will Self collaborated with Ralph Steadman.

“But here the tone is markedly different, the author’s usual Technicolor exuberance tempered by a monochrome melancholy. It is significant that Steadman’s illustrations have been displaced by the sort of black-and-white photographs beloved of WG Sebald; Self’s writing seems to have taken a darker turn under the German writer’s saturnine influence. Not that this book entirely lacks the old scatological mischief. Sebald, after all, is unlikely to have described car exhausts as ‘turbofarts’.”

New Bloomsbury book covers

Posted on by

Greg Heinimann at Bloomsbury has created a series of new book covers for Will Self’s back catalogue to coincide with the paperback publication of Walking to Hollywood (below) in September. The new covers are for My Idea of Fun, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Cock & Bull, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, Junk Mail, Grey Area, Great Apes and The Butt.

Read a short report about it in Creative Review here.

Walking to Hollywood paperback

The Idler Academy: Being There

Posted on by

Will Self returns to the Idler Academy for a symposium on walking to mark the publication in paperback of his book Walking to Hollywood (Bloomsbury). Self’s talk, Being There, will discuss the idea of using walking as a way of escaping “the man-machine matrix: that nexus of mass communication and transit that ensures we never really ever are where we are, but always being transported somewhere else.”

The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH, Thursday 15 September, 6.30pm for 7pm, £20. Includes “free wine and dainty morsels”. Visit the Idler website for more details.

Two short interviews and one longer one

Posted on by

There’s a short interview with Will Self in the Big Issue Scotland here, and an interview with Book Buzz in the States here around the publication of Psychogeography, which we overlooked at the time.

And a longer one too is available to listen to – Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place at the Los Angeles Public Library – here.

After London talk at the University of Greenwich

Posted on by

Will Self is going to be in conversation with Matthew Beaumont and others at the Howe lecture theatre, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London on Sunday 13 March from 2pm to 4pm.

As part of the current exhibition After London, which responds to the apocalyptic vision of London set out in Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel, the discussion will focus on apocalyptic landscapes in literature, art and film.

To reserve a place, which is free, email the gallery, slg@gre.ac.uk. More details here.

The deep topography of Nick Papadimitriou

Posted on by

There was a short feature on Will Self’s friend and colleague the “deep topographer” Nick Papadimitriou, who most recently helped with the research on Self’s The Book of Dave, that included contributions from Self, Iain Sinclair and Russell Brand on Newsnight last night. You can watch it again here – it starts around the 36-minute mark. Papadimitriou’s book Scarp is due to be published next year by Sceptre. His podcasts on Resonance FM can be downloaded here, and there’s a short clip from The London Perambulator here.