Daunt Books, Chelsea
Posted by Chris H on December 3rd, 2009Will Self is going to be talking about Psycho Too at Daunt Books in Chelsea on Thursday December 10 at 7pm. For further details, visit the Daunt Books website.
Archive for the 'Books' Category
Steve Wright in the Afternoon interview
Posted by Chris H on December 3rd, 2009To listen to Will Self talking to Steve Wright about Psycho Too, visit the BBC’s iplayer. It’s at the 2hr 32min mark and lasts for five minutes or so (available until Tuesday December 8).
Mortality, the corpse and the fiction of Will Self
Posted by Chris H on November 22nd, 2009The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Mortality, the Corpse and the Fiction of Will Self.
Death, according to Jacque Lynn Foltyn, has replaced sex as the 21st century’s definitive taboo. While the valance has long since been ripped away from the collective Victorian piano leg, the corpse, meanwhile, has become primed with symbolic explosives, threatening the very foundations of society built upon the mythology of modernist progress. Be it the computer-generated cadavers of CSI Miami, or Gunther von Hagens’ reality TV autopsies, Foltyn argues that the human corpse has become an increasingly pervasive object of revulsion and attraction in our culture, a site of anxiety about medicine’s failure to conquer, but enthusiasm to hide, death. With all this in mind, it’s not surprising to find that the fiction of Will Self – an author who frequently weaves his narratives in, around, and beyond the boundaries of taboo – is one who showcases several literary autopsies, in which death and the human corpse are explored with a surgeon’s eye (and, more often than not, a coroner’s tongue).
Desert Crossing
Posted by Chris H on November 18th, 2009From Adam & Eve Projects: “Will Self shuns Dubai’s manic road system in favour of navigating his way across the desert on foot. Will’s destination is the opulent desert oasis, Bab Al Shams Resort where he photographs and writes about his slightly alien adventure.”
Will Self and Ralph Steadman on the Today programme
Posted by Chris H on November 5th, 2009To listen to Will Self and Ralph Steadman talking on the Today programme about their new book, Psycho Too, visit the BBC website here. There’s also an audio slideshow of Steadman’s illustrations here.
Book Now event at Richmond
Posted by Chris H on November 4th, 2009Will Self introduces his “brilliant Psycho Too, a meditation on the vexed relationship of psyche and place in a globalised world. It brings together a second helping of the very best words and pictures from Psychogeography – the columns Self contributed to the Independent for half a decade; accompanied by Ralph Steadman’s edgy, and dazzling artwork” at Book Now – Richmond upon Thames’ annual literature festival, Clarendon Hall, York House, November 24, 7.30pm, £10 (£8.50 concession) – £5 of ticket redeemable against book price.
Will Self: My Other Life
Posted by Chris H on November 4th, 2009“I thought I might be an academic. I read PPE at Oxford and was very interested in Marx, Wittgenstein, Habermas – theories of knowledge and praxis. I applied to do an MPhil, but unfortunately I was busted for drugs before I sat my finals and went into something of a tailspin … ”
To read the rest of My Other Life: Will Self, visit the Guardian website here.
Will Self and Ralph Steadman at the Roundhouse
Posted by Chris H on October 28th, 2009Will Self and Ralph Steadman will be at the Studio Theatre, the Roundhouse, Camden on November 10 at 7.30pm to talk about their second collection of Psychogeography columns in the Independent, Psycho Too (here’s a brief review from Publishers Weekly), which is dedicated to the memory of JG Ballard.
Libraries are for literature, not lattes
Posted by Chris H on October 28th, 2009Piece in the Herald, ahead of Will Self’s appearance at the North Lanarkshire Words festival on Thursday October 29 at the Motherwell library, 7.30pm.
A critical essay on Leberknödel from Liver
Posted by Chris H on October 22nd, 2009Liver Let Die
Will Self’s newest collection, Liver, contains a novella, Leberknödel, that is set in Zurich and has a protagonist called Joyce Beddoes. Call me an obsessive Irishman, but put “Zurich” and “Joyce” together and you automatically come up with James Joyce, who wrote a number of chapters of Ulysses in Zurich, died and is buried there. The link seems obvious to me. When you discover that Self’s Joyce eats a meal at the famous Kronenhalle (James Joyce’s favourite hangout and the place where he ate his last proper meal) and that she has reserved a plot in Fluntern cemetery (the very same cemetery where James Joyce lies buried), then you know that the sequence of coincidences is not a sequence of coincidences. Strangely, in British reviews of Self’s book in the likes of The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement, not one critic has picked up on this. If the allusions to James Joyce were simply decorative then perhaps the reviewers could be forgiven for leaving it unmentioned. But to miss the ghostly absence of James Joyce in this occult novella is to read a different story then the one Self has written.
