Will has written an original essay for ‘The Exchange’ – a collaboration between Crossed Lines and the Science Museum – exploring the impact of the iconic K6 telephone box and the 706L Modern Phone on both public and private communication and examines how these technologies continue to shape our understanding of the world.
You can read or listen to it at the Science Museum or Crossed Lines.
Will Self’s memoir, Will, is published today by Viking. Duncan White in The Daily Telegraph said: “Self writes with the same propulsive prose that he has deployed in his masterful recent trilogy, Umbrella (2012), Shark (2014) and Phone (2017), replete with riffs, puns, recursive loops and characteristic ellipses and italics. Perhaps Will is just another Selfian character, subject to absolute authorial control, the fragmented derangement of his youth woven into an intricate and coherent whole by the mature author.”
Will Self’s talk from October 2018 at the Hillingdon Literary Festival, which begins with a reading from a section of his short story “Scale” (from Grey Area). Will discusses the writing of his books Walking to Hollywood and Phone, the importance of the M40 in his fiction, pretending to be British, the Iraq war and a little about his new memoir, Will, which is due to be published in November.
Listen to Will Self reading his short story “The North London Book of the Dead” on Radio 4 here until 9 May. It was first broadcast in 1995.
Will Self’s novel Great Apes (“Planet of the Apes meets Nineteen Eighty-Four … humorous, gripping and provocative”) has been adapted for the stage by Patrick Marmion (The Divided Laing) and will be on at Arcola Theatre in east London from today until April 21. For tickets, visit arcolatheatre.com. Read what Will has to say about the origins of his 1996 novel and why he’s delighted it’s being adapted for the stage here.
There’s a rare chance to catch Will in the States this week – tonight at 7pm he’ll be at a free event at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02138; on Thursday at 7.30pm he’ll be reading from Phone with Martin Amis at 92ND STREET Y, Unterberg Poetry Center, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY, 10128; and on Saturday at 6pm he’ll be at: Politics and Prose book store, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC, 20008.
The FT said Phone is “A novel of grand ideas, powered by a ravenous curiosity about the role of the technological revolution in our private and public woes, Phone nonetheless bristles with anxiety about the abuse of ‘intelligence’ — in medicine, in warfare, in software, in love … [Self’s] hurricane of eloquence blows in terrific passages of satire, comedy, even suspense — not to mention his pitch-perfect ear for the jargons and lingoes of modernity.”
will-self.com is the official website for British novelist and journalist Will Self. The site is managed by Chris Hall and Chris Mitchell.
If you want to get in touch, you can email us at info@will-self.com
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If you have a specific request for Will regarding commissions, book rights etc, you can contact his agent Tracy Bohan at The Wylie Agency, 17 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA – www.wylieagency.co.uk
