Val Carmichael credited Pete Stenning — who was called ‘the Martian’ — with getting him off the gin and on to the vodka. “Cleaver cunt, the Martian,” Val said to the assembled members, who were grouped at the bar of the Plantation Club in their alloted positions …
Listen to Will Self read the start of Foie Humain here and then here, the first of his four part story-cycle in Liver, which is available as an unabridged audio book from Whole Story Audio Books for £19.99 here.
A curious incident on the South Downs: driving my eldest son and his stuff down to his new rented accommodation in Brighton, prior to his second year at Sussex University, we pulled the van off the motorway and drove up towards Devil’s Dyke. I wanted to show Lex the Dyke, and also his youngest brother, Luther, who was along for the ride. My own father used to take me up here on the weekends we spent in Brighton at my grandparents’ house on Vernon Terrace, and he would always tell the folk tale about how the Dyke was dug by the Devil to flood the Sussex Weald, but that he was surprised in the middle of the night by an old woman cotter lighting her oil lamp, and taking it for the dawn he jumped all the way to the North Downs where he landed forming the Devil’s Punchbowl on impact.
Walking to Hollywood, Will Self’s new book, is published by Bloomsbury today. One of the first reviews is from the Sunday Times, who said that it was “Casually delirious and unfailingly precise … the whole book is a painfully brilliant performance full of Self’s characteristic obsessions with scale, texture and metamorphosis. The overall effect is hallucinogenic, paranoid and almost gruellingly clever.”
There was an interview with Self in the Telegraph last week talking about the book, which can be found here.
Some forthcoming tour dates with Will Self talking about Walking to Hollywood:
September 7 at the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham, West Sussex. Details here.
September 9 at the SW11 festival in London. Details here.
September 13 at Arnolfini, Bristol. Details here.
September 14 at Topping books in Bath. Details here.
September 17 at Cambridge Arts Centre. Details here.
October 4 at Clapham Bookshop, 7pm. More details here.
October 11, Ilkley literature festival. Details here.
Will Self has written a big piece for the Guardian’s Review section, published tomorrow, writing about his preoccupation with scale, tracing his interest in it from his short story Scale through to his new book, Walking to Hollywood. Read the article here.
Will Self will once again be appearing at the Ilkley literature festival on Monday October 11 at 7.30pm at the Kings Hall to talk about his latest book, Walking to Hollywood. Tickets go on sale on August 31.
I went to dinner at the McCluskeys’ and the Brookmans were there, as usual — and the Vignoles as well …
An exclusive for the website this. Listen to Will Self reading The Minor Character, an unpublished short story, which will be part of his collection of short stories, The Undivided Self, to be published by Bloomsbury USA in October. Self recorded The Minor Character while he was narrating an unabridged audio version of Liver, which will be published by Whole Story Audio Books in September.
An interesting paper entitled Literature, History and the Humanization of Bioethics by Nathan Emmerich (Bioethics, 9999 (9999) 2010) quotes from Self’s Leberknödel story from Liver. The full text can be obtained here, but this is the relevant section:
“There is little doubt that literature can be a tool for the teaching of bioethics. Consider this passage from one of Will Self’s short stories:
To Sebastian Horsley’s funeral at St James’s in Piccadilly. I first met Seb in the early 1990s, he was living in Mayfair in order – or so he maintained – to be near to the prostitutes. He had the dead-white face of a Weimar cabaret compère, and the lisp of a studied aesthete. When we went out to the cash point together to get money for the dealer, Seb revealed that he had a loaded revolver back at the flat. I was furious – I’ve never liked guns, and guns and crack cocaine (as history seems to bear out), are seldom a good combo.
Will Self is going to be at the Edinburgh book festival at 9.30pm on Sunday August 29 and will be reading from and talking about his new book, Walking to Hollywood (which can be ordered from Amazon here). Titled “The dreams and fantasies of an obsessive-compulsive flâneur”, the event costs £10 (£8 concessions).
“Self’s mordant satire is at the peak of its form in a new triptych, Walking to Hollywood, a potent mixture of memoir and invention, which centres on his passion for wandering on foot around cities. Eventually Self decides to take a walk on British land that is about to be consumed by the sea.”