A 20 minute video of Will Self reading an excerpt from his forthcoming novel “Umbrella” at The Literature Society’s ‘Alternative Good Friday Sermon Event’.
Will Self: Books
Umbrella
Umbrella, scheduled for publication by Bloomsbury on 30th August 2012. Pre-ordering is already available at Amazon.co.uk. (Umbrella currently does not have a USA publication date).
“A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.” James Joyce, Ulysses
Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community – the so-called Concept House in Willesden – maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.
David Tennant To Appear In Adaptation Of A Will Self Short Story
Actor David Tennant, a former Doctor in Dr Who, will be playing the role of Will, a “witty, acerbic artist” in a one-off drama for Sky Arts based on “The Minor Character”, a short story by Will Self. “The Minor Character” was published in the collection The Undivided Self. Further details to follow.
You can find The Undivided Self at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
You can also listen to Will reading The Minor Character.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker
Penguin has just published an ebook of Will Self’s collected Real Meals columns, The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker, for the bargain price of £1.99. (This edition is currently only available in the UK – if it’s published in the USA we’ll add an update).
“Most food writing and restaurant criticism is concerned with the ideal, with how by cooking this, or dining there, you can somehow ingurgitate a new – or at any rate improved – social, aesthetic and even spiritual persona. I aimed to turn this proposition on its head, and instead of commenting on where and what people would ideally like to eat, I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and – most importantly – fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon in the go-round of their often hurried and dyspeptic lives.”
Walking to Hollywood: paperback of the year
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’.”
Penguin Ink: The Book of Dave
Penguin has commissioned the tattoo artist Duncan X to redesign the book cover of Will Self’s The Book of Dave as part of its limited edition Penguin Ink series. To buy a copy for £10, visit the Penguin site here.
The new cover for The Book of Dave
New Bloomsbury book covers
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.
The Idler Academy: Being There
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.
Paris Review interview
An interview with Will Self about Walking to Hollywood at the Paris Review here.
Dorian and Oscar Wilde
Will Self is going to be discussing his book Dorian and Oscar Wilde’s writing with the film and literary critic Kevin Jackson on May 13 at the V&A. For more details and to book tickets, go here.