Will and Ralph, united at last
Posted by Chris H on April 25th, 2008For those of you frustrated by the absence of Ralph Steadman’s artwork when we publish Will’s Psychogeography columns from the Independent, here at last is an archive of them.
The Never-Ending Tour #4: The curate’s egging on
Posted by WS on April 23rd, 2008A children’s TV presenter had hanged himself at Paddington Station and his body wasn’t found for six days. Grim, but then big city rail terminuses always are: the temporary repositories of vice and despair; gutters through which the pure waters of the provinces are sluiced into the urban cesspit. Paddington isn’t helped by being within yards of St Mary’s Hospital, where, in the 1890s, heroin was synthesised for the first time. The station always has this peculiar smacklight: diffuse, dreamy, brown, and desperate. In my 1993 story Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo, the adulterous lovers rendezvous close to Paddington, at Sussex Gardens. The antihero parks the eponymous Volvo by the needle exchange Portakabin on South Wharf Road. A woman has written into the site, apropos of this blog, and asks is there any part of my life that is unobserved, unrecorded? All I can say in reply – paternalistically, patronisingly, and now, illegally – is that you don’t know one half of one half of one ten-thousandth of it, love.
The never-ending tour #3: The brilliance of the Brompton
Posted by WS on April 1st, 2008I’m not sure if sauntering up the road to Clapham Books counts as ‘touring’, but what the hell. Ed, Nikki and Al are lovely, gentle people, who took over the lease of the bookshop where they once worked and are now doing their level best to make it work in difficult times. Clapham Books is my local bookshop – not, you understand, that I live in Clapham – that would be hell. I say they’re lovely gentle people, but frankly, have you ever met a bookseller who wasn’t? I mean, they can be introverted and cantankerous in my experience, but they’re seldom aggressive, and never psychopathic.
Ask Will a question
Posted by Chris H on March 31st, 2008Here at www.will-self.com, we’re running a Q&A with Will to coincide with the publication of The Butt, which we’ll publish on the site and at Bloomsbury’s too. Simply email your questions to info@will-self.com and we’ll put the best of them to him. The deadline for sending in your questions is April 14.
Win a copy of Slump and The Butt
Posted by Chris H on March 27th, 2008Yes, it’s competition time again, to celebrate the publication of Will’s new novel, The Butt.
Will has kindly offered one of his very own copies of his first ever published work, a collection of cartoons he did for the New Statesman, Slump, as first prize (the winner will receive a copy of The Butt too). There were very limited numbers of the paperback book published by Virgin in 1985, and it remains one of the most collectable of Will’s books. Bloomsbury has also kindly offered nine more copies of The Butt as runners-up prizes.
Why should we bale out the fat cats?
Posted by Chris H on March 26th, 2008Read Will’s Evening Standard column of 18.03.08 here
Guardian interview
Posted by Chris H on March 26th, 2008The Guardian has one of the first interviews with Will to coincide with the publication of his new novel, The Butt.
Getting round to the Falkirk Wheel
Posted by Chris H on March 26th, 2008Lowland Scotland is networked with motorways - many of them astonishingly empty. Where my mother-in-law lives, in Motherwell, you can get in the jamjar, and within an hour be in Stirling Castle, or Edinburgh Castle, or clambering up the natural fortification of Ben Lomond. So, you can be forgiven for thinking of the entire statelet as a series of arbitrarily interchangeable visitor attractions. We were zooming up to Stirling when I saw the sign for the Falkirk Wheel. We’d been meaning to go on the Wheel for yonks, but somehow hadn’t got round to it. Boom-boom. Now seemed like the right time: the day was as bright as a political theorist who’s just solved the West Lothian question, and the views - I felt confident - would be superb. I diverted on to another empty motorway and drove straight into a filthy fogbank. Still, even if the prospects had dimmed there was still the miracle of engineering itself for us to admire.
The Butt continues here …
Posted by Chris H on March 25th, 2008To find out where Will is going to be giving readings and attending events on his promotional tour of The Butt, to be published April 7 by Bloomsbury, visit Will’s author page at Bloomsbury’s website.
‘No prawn sandwiches - what stale hell was this?’
Posted by WS on March 25th, 2008On the train to Cambridge, I took a call from a nice-sounding young woman at the Financial Times. She was to ask me questions for a questionnaire in her newspaper. I’d forgotten she was calling, and found myself temporarily discombobulated, ie when the questions began, their absurdity hit me like a freight train. ‘What is your favourite book?’ ‘Who is your literary inspiration?’ All that sort of reductive guff that puffs up the pages of prints too poor to source reporting anymore.
