Andre Mayer turns in a good piece on Self for Canadian magazine Eye Weekly:
“It has always been interesting to me to create a completely alternative set of worlds for my fiction to take place in,” Self admits in a phone interview from his home in London. “It’s so much more interesting to write about something that is both real and seemingly unreal. It places the reader in a state of questioning about reality itself.”
The Guardian’s condensed send-up of How The Dead Live’s plotline.
The condensed version of the condensed version is particularly good:
“Reworking of the fucking Tibetan Book of the Dead in which Lily Bloom lives, dies and finds some form of fucking redemption”
Self reads an extract of his novel How The Dead Live for Salon Audio
Nicholas Wroe interviews Will Self in the wake of How The Dead Live’s publication:
“Looking back, Self thinks that getting his first book accepted was the high point of his literary career. “By this time I had children to support, but more than that, at a personal level, it was enormously liberating knowing I could do this thing. Whether out of anxiety or productivity, I just didn’t want to stop doing it.”
To celebrate the paperback release of How the Dead Live, Will Self’s inventive, savage meditation on life after death, Penguin have rejacketed several of Will’s books with stunning new artwork from some of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists.
In an exclusive interview, we asked Will his thoughts on everything from drug addiction and Jewishness to the disintegration of the soul.
You’re involved with many things; journalism, short-stories, novels. Do you regard these as being quite different activities?
Will Self – How The Dead Live
Synopsis:
The extraordinary story of a 65-yr-old woman who lies dying in a London hospital. As she’s in the process of being ferried across to the other world (which turns out to be remarkably like this one), she reflects on her husbands, her children, her entire life. Brilliant and witty as always, Self has this time written a novel that carries a huge emotional punch in its portrait of a wonderful middle-aged woman – based apparently on his mother.