Will Self » Books

Walking to Hollywood: paperback of the year

Chris H — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:43:42 +0000

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

Chris H — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 17:48:56 +0000

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

Chris H — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:21:50 +0000

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

Chris H — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:05:33 +0000

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

Chris H — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:23:52 +0000

An interview with Will Self about Walking to Hollywood at the Paris Review here.

Dorian and Oscar Wilde

Chris H — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:02:07 +0000

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.

Walking to Hollywood (US)

Chris H — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:25:47 +0000

Will Self’s Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall will be published by Grove in the US on May 3. You can order it from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indiebound, Borders, Books a Million and Powells.

A reminder that you can watch excerpts of Will walking in LA here on our site and read some of the reviews of the book here too.

Two short interviews and one longer one

Chris H — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:15:00 +0000

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

Chris H — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:32:26 +0000

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

Chris H — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:33:40 +0000

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.