Watch Will Self talking about a care home for the novel, rather than death, the meaning of his novella Leberknödel and much more:
Also, Will gave a reading from his latest novel, Shark, which is published in paperback on 5 March by Penguin:
Listen to Will Self give a reading from Shark and taking questions at the LRB bookshop recently, here.
Shark is published in hardback by Grove Atlantic in the US today, RRP $26:
“May 4, 1970. A week earlier, President Nixon ordered American ground forces into Cambodia to pursue the Vietcong. By the end of the day, four students will be shot dead by the National Guard on the grounds of Kent State University. On the other side of the Atlantic, it’s a brilliant sunny morning after an April of heavy rain, and at the “Concept House” therapeutic community he has set up in the London suburb of Willesden, maverick psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner has been tricked into joining a decidedly ill-advised LSD trip with several of its disturbed residents. Five years later, sitting in a nearby cinema watching Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Busner realizes the true nature of the events that transpired on that dread-soaked day, when a survivor of the worst disaster in the U.S. Navy’s history—the sinking of the USS Indianapolis—came face-to-face with the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gay’s mission to bomb Hiroshima.
Listen to Will Self talking about Shark on Newstalk’s Pat Kenny Show in Ireland here or below (from about the 17 minute mark).
The Financial Times: “… an intoxicating experience. Self’s powerful command of language animates the intense prose while his dry wit is given a freer rein than in Umbrella. Shark drives remorselessly on; it takes us with it.”
The Mail on Sunday: “Self is on a mission to revive modernist fiction and newcomers will find the text, excised of paragraphs and most punctuation, tough at first. But it is unmatched for vibrancy and sensation, and befits the novel’s raw, disturbing subjects – the traumatised lives that orbit Dr Busner’s therapeutic community.”
Listen to Will Self and the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker talking to Matthew Sweet on Free Thinking on Radio 3 here.
Listen to Will talking about Shark on Radio 4’s Front Row last night, here.
