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?
From The Guardian review of Feeding Frenzy by Zulfikar Abbany, November 11, 2001
Feeding Frenzy sets a marker on Self’s career, not least because the unorthodox restaurant reviews he wrote for The Observer, from 1995-97, are collated here – reviews that afforded him a notoriety with which he colluded. While readers choked on their laughter, cooks across the country were after Self’s blood.
Will Self – Perfidious Man
Synopsis:
Through text and pictures, this book will explores what it is to be a man at the turn of the century, whether masculinity can be said to have any currency any more, and asks “where have all the real men gone?”
Will Self – Sore Sites
Synopsis:
A collection of articles from Building Design architectural magazine which present Will Self’s idiosyncratic view of the built environment.
Synopsis:
Mother crops up dead but talking in Crouch End; a cellular telephone scam ends in drugged psychosis; a mental ward captivates then captures an art therapist; motorcycle messengers mystically intuit London traffic flows. These are some of the stories featured in this collection.
Synopsis:
It looks like it is going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, a Christmas powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded, as trapped in the bosom of the nastiest, most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts.
Synopsis:
Will Self’s collected journalism and writings. Most of the pieces are centred around the subject of drugs and the counter-culture. Pieces range from an article on crack dealers in the East End called “New Crack City” through to dialogues with Martin Amis, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard.
Synopsis:
These stories create a world of oddity superimposed on an ordinary world. They include six controllers running the whole of London life in all its minutiae; a nightmare tour of Soho where everyone professes to be a writer, and the discovery in 1000 years’ time of our strange motorway culture.
Synopsis:
This black comedy is divided into two parts. In the first a woman grows a penis and rapes her husband. In the second a man grows a vagina behind his knee and is then seduced by his doctor.
Cock And Bull was first published in 1992.
Cock And Bull Reviews:
