Will Self

  • Books
    • Will
    • Phone
    • Shark
    • Umbrella
    • The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker
    • The Undivided Self
    • Walking to Hollywood
    • Liver
    • The Butt
    • The Book Of Dave
    • Psycho Too
    • Psychogeography
    • Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
    • Dorian
    • Feeding Frenzy
    • How The Dead Live
    • Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
    • Great Apes
    • Cock And Bull
    • Grey Area
    • Junk Mail
    • My Idea Of Fun
    • Perfidious Man
    • Sore Sites
    • The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
    • The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
  • Journalism
    • The Big Issue
    • Daily Telegraph
    • Evening Standard
    • The First Post
    • GQ
    • The Guardian
    • High Life
    • Independent
    • London Review of Books
    • New Statesman
    • The New York Times
    • Observer
    • Prospect
    • The Times
    • Walk
  • Radio and Audio
  • Television
  • Appearances

KCRW radio interview

December 5, 2013

Listen to an interview with Will Self about Umbrella on KCRW (of Santa Monica College) here.

Umbrella playlist

October 28, 2013

In largeheartedboy.com’s Book Notes series, Will Self has created – and discusses – a music playlist that relates to his most recently published book, Umbrella, from the Kinks’ “Ape Man” to “Don’t Let it Die” by Hurricane Smith.

Flytopia short film

October 14, 2013

Flytopia short film from Karni and Saul – Sulkybunny on Vimeo.

Film version of Will Self’s short story Flytopia from his collection Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys from Film4. You can read what Will has to say about it too. Flytopia was filmed by Karni & Saul, and it premiered online today.

More Umbrella press

January 16, 2013

Here’s an interview with Will Self in the National Post of Canada, and another one for the Daily Beast.

Also, there’s a review of Umbrella at the NPR, which hails it as a “modernist masterpiece”, and an interview with Will here (which includes a reading from Umbrella by Will), and also a review in the Washington Post too.

Live video chat

January 15, 2013

Will Self is going to conduct a live video chat with the LA Times today at 10am Pacific (6pm GMT) about his new novel, Umbrella, and many other things besides.

Watch again here.

Umbrella – An introduction and ‘The Rules’

January 12, 2013

For US readers of Umbrella, here’s Will on how he researched his latest novel, which is a good introduction:

“Whenever I reach the end of a novel – and I mean the very end, when the second set of proofs have been corrected, and the button at the printers, for good or ill, has been pushed – I find myself plagued by a very particular and almost hallucinatory condition that I’ve dubbed – with exactitude if not felicity – ‘everythingitis’. The distinguishing feature of everythingitis – which it shares with certain bizarre mental states that afflict the overly zealous adepts of Zen meditation – is an obsessive need to review the content of the entire world, both physical and psychic, to check whether it has been incorporated into the text just completed. Are there puddles in the novel? Do adolescent girls flick back their hair at least once? And, if so, have the lobes of their ears – or lack of them – been described? I must stress: everythingitis covers everything, and as any novel that is genuinely ambitious tries to be a synecdoche of the world, so the malaise ramifies and ramifies: the novel may be set among disaffected teenagers in Zurich in 2006, but following its inexorably pathological logic, might there be a case for including at least a faint echo of the impact of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 on the Byzantine aristocracy?”

Visit the FT’s website here for the full article.

And for those who really want to drill down into the text, here are Donna Poppy’s copy editing rules for Umbrella:

  • Italic has been used for “ejaculatory” thought – that is, thought that seems to pop out from the ordinary narrative, either because of its figurative qualities, or because of its heightened emotional qualities, or both. Hence things that would normally be in italic – everything from titles to foreign words – appear in roman. Snatches of song and verse are also italicised, as are named individual letters.
  • Enclosing inverted commas are, for the most part, absent from the book. Dialogue is preceded by a short dash only when the rule’s presence is necessary to avoid confusion, ie when the speech in question is without a verb of saying or some other obvious indicator of speech.
  • Long dashes (em rules) indicate temporal shifts or mood shifts, and can be thought of as aspirations – that is, breaths – in the text. Shifts in point of view are deliberately without signals of any kind. Additionally, em rules also stand in for one or more omitted letters within a word, in the conventional way.
  • Short dashes (en rules) indicate new thoughts. If a new thought starts mid-sentence, so does the en dash – which accounts for why it sometimes appears after the closing comma in a clause. Short dashes also indicate that a line of dialogue has been interrupted or broken off – hence –? –. –! all appear.
  • ?No semicolons.

Umbrella US reviews

January 12, 2013

Grove has just published Umbrella in the States, and early reviews have been as effusive as they were in the UK last year.

The Boston Globe: “The result is page after page of gorgeously musical prose. Self’s sentences bounce and weave, and like poetry, they refract. The result is mesmerizing.”

For the full review, go here.

The Economist: “An entertaining and enthralling book … [Self] has managed to write an experimental novel that is also a compassionate and thrilling book—and one that, despite its difficulty, deserves to be read.”

For the full review, go here.

The Washington Post: “Self’s wildly nonlinear narrative offers other delights: richly detailed settings that bring the Edwardian era and mental hospitals sensuously alive, kaleidoscopic patterns of symbolism (umbrellas assume all sorts of forms and functions), and loads of mordant satire. Yes, Umbrella is a ‘difficult’ novel, but it amply rewards the effort.”

To buy a copy of Umbrella for $16.24, go to Amazon here.

On Umbrella’s US publication

January 11, 2013

This will be the first major publication of one of my books in the US that I haven’t crossed the pond for – and so salutations to my American readers; I write to you from my London fastness, tucked up snugly at the top of my 1848 house in sarf London, looking across the rooftops to where Renzo Piano’s Shard upthrusts, a teasing A la recherche de priapisme perdu. I have mixed feelings about not making it over – I am, of course, a demi-American on the maternal side, and hold a US passport, so the States is not so much close to me as engrafted. On the other hand, if I have any nationality at all, it’s Londonish, and the older I get, the less I like to stray.

Family matters ostensibly keep me here in London, but there’s also a part of me that sees the author tour – when mediated by jet fuel – as something of a solecism. Surely the entire point of being a writer is to reach people with your words, not your breath? Certainly that’s what attracted me to being a writer in the first place: what thrilled me about reading was that in the medium of the text I met with another sensibility decoupled from all contingent factors – sex, age, ethnicity, class – and so experienced the purest and most intimate comingling possible.

In my experience, meeting the writers you admire is almost always a disappointment – how can it not be? – and I wonder why it is that more people don’t feel that way. Here in the YooKay (a mostly fictional land), the old-style bookshop readings have been replaced by a myriad of book festivals, and really this is only because serried municipalities have figured out that, as desperate writers will do almost anything for no money whatsoever, it’s a cheap way of inculcating their miserable and isolate burghs with a little kulturkampf. They are immensely popular – these BritLitFests – and have become the Nuremberg rallies of the contemporary bourgeoisie. I cordially loathe most of them …

Still, at least they afford me the opportunity of reading publically to a lot of potential readers (even if most of them are there to see the latest celebrity egg-flipper, and just came along faut de mieux), whereas, apart from back in the day when I was an enfant terrible – instead of a grotty middle-aged man – my readings Stateside have mostly been to handfuls of buck-toothed teens in Barnes & Nobles marooned in out-of-town strip malls …

So, much better I stay here and do what I do best: crack on with the next book, a strange sort of sequel to Umbrella. In Umbrella, Dr Zack Busner mentions an incident with the foolhardy use of LSD in his Willesden Concept House (he says it was three years before, ie 1968, but his memory deceives him – the bad trip in fact took place in May 1970, the same day as the Kent State shootings). Anyway, I think you can probably guess the direction my wayward fictive sensibility is taking … back to the future for Busner’s next appearance in Shark.

Very best,

Will Self

European Bookshop titles

December 2, 2012

The European Bookshop in Soho, central London now has a wide selection of foreign language editions of Will Self’s books, from a French edition of The Book of Dave (Le livre de Dave) to a Spanish edition of How the Dead Live (Cómo vivien los muertos). You can browse – and buy – the books here.

Umbrella audio book

October 18, 2012

To buy an unabridged audio book version of Umbrella, by Whole Story Audiobooks, which has also produced audio versions of The Butt, Liver (read by Will), The Book of Dave (also read by Will) and How the Dead Live, go to Amazon here.

Will’s own readings of Dorian (Penguin) and Revelation (Canongate) are also available on audio.

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Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Elaine
Will Self's latest book Elaine will be published in hardback by Grove on September 5 2024 in the UK and September 17 2024 in the USA.

You can pre-order at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Will’s Previous Books

Will Self - Will
Will
More info
Amazon.co.uk

  Will Self - Phone
Phone
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Shark
Shark
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Umbrella
Umbrella
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
More info
Amazon.co.uk
  Walking To Hollywood
Walking To Hollywood
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Butt
The Butt
More info Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Grey Area
Grey Area
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Junk Mail
Junk Mail
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Great Apes
Great Apes
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Cock And Bull
Cock And Bull
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
More info

Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  My Idea Of Fun
My Idea Of Fun
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Book Of Dave
The Book Of Dave
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Psychogeography
Psychogeography
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Psycho Too
Psycho II
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Liver
Liver
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
How The Dead Live
How The Dead Live
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Dorian
Dorian
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Feeding Frenzy
Feeding Frenzy
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Sore Sites
Sore Sites
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Perfidious Man
Perfidious Man
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  The Undivided Self
The Undivided Self
More info Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Bloomsbury  
Penguin

About / Contact

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

All email will be read, but we can’t guarantee a response.

PR agencies, please DO NOT put this email address on any mailing lists.

If you have a specific request for Will regarding commissions, book rights etc, you can contact his agent via agent@will-self.com

Will’s Writing Room

Will's Writing Room
– a 360 degree view in 71 photos

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