Will Self

Umbrella events schedule

(Also look out for interviews with Will on the Today programme, in Time Out, the Spectator, and on the Robert Elms Show. More to follow.)

August 24: 4pm, Happy Days, Belmore Street, Enniskillen, Will Self in Conversation.

August 25: 9.30pm, Edinburgh book festival, In discussion with Stuart Kelly.

August 26: 8.30pm, Edinburgh book festival, in discussion with “deep topographer” and author of Scarp, Nick Papadimitriou.

September 6: 7pm, Will Self on the digital essay, LRB bookshop event, 14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL.

September 13: South Bank, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Will Self launches his new novel, Umbrella, in the first of a series of events curated by him exploring the legacy and provocation of modernism upon writing today.

September 15: An audience with Will Self, St Georges Theatre in Great Yarmouth.

September 19: 6.30pm, The Idler Academy, St Stephen’s Church, Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QT. Will Self returns to the Idler Academy to read from his new novel, chat and answer your questions. This is a special chance to meet him properly in an intimate setting over a drink and ask him to sign your book.

September 21: 6pm, Main Hall, BHASVIC, 205 Dyke Road, Hove, BN3 6EG, £8, tickets available from City Books, 23 Western Road, Hove, email info@city-books.co.uk.

September 25: 7.30pm, Clapham Bookshop, free, no need to book.

September 27: Wreford Watson lecture, Edinburgh.

September 29: Midday, South Bank, modernism lecture with Gabriel Josipovici – Will Self chairing. 2pm: South Bank, modernism lecture – Jonathan Coe on BS Johnson – Will Self chairing.

October 4: Intelligence Squared Bloomsbury Book Club with Will Self. Come and discuss Will Self’s most ambitious novel to date with Will and his editor at the offices of Bloomsbury Publishing in Bedford Square.

October 7: 2pm, Hall One, Kings Place, London, Will Self: Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia.

October 7: 7.45pm, Cambridge Arts Theatre.

October 11: 7pm, An evening with Will Self, Oxford Waterstones, 01865 790212.

October 14: 7.30pm, Close Up with Will Self, Manchester Royal Exchange.

October 15: 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall, Man Booker shortlist event. Note, this event will also be shown live at the Picturehouse chain of cinemas. More details here.

October 16: London Transport Museum, “Join broadcaster Robert Elms, Will Self and artist Stephen Walter as they discuss what lies beneath London. Explore forgotten sewers, lost graveyards and hidden rivers … and maybe some of London’s sunken treasures.” NB This event will now be on November 19.

October 17: 7pm, Hull, Ideas Allowed, Orchard Park Centre.

October 22: 7pm, Brunel university, Newton Room, Hamilton Centre, Modernism: an evening of debate with Will Self and John Carey.

October 23: 8pm, Inside Out Festival, Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s College London

October 24: 8pm, Bath, Topping & Company Booksellers.

October 25: 6pm-7pm, Bristol, Arnolfini.

October 29: 7.30pm, Chester Literary Festival.

November 1: Waterstones, Hampstead.

November 7: 7.30pm, free, at the Literary Leicester Festival.

November 12: 7pm, Brunel university, Newton Room, Hamilton Centre, Modernism: an evening of debate with Will Self and Iain Sinclair.

November 14: Friern Barnet library, 7pm, details here.

November 19: London Transport Museum. ”Join broadcaster Robert Elms, Will Self and artist Stephen Walter as they discuss what lies beneath London. Explore forgotten sewers, lost graveyards and hidden rivers … and maybe some of London’s sunken treasures.”

November 22: Longford lecture, Assembly Hall of Church House, Westminster SW1P 3NZ. Mind Bending Behind Bars: Drug Use in British Prisons.

December 1: University of Roehampton, London.

Umbrella interview and pieces

As the publication of Umbrella on August 16 nears, Will Self talks to the Observer about his new Man Booker-longlisted novel (and, briefly, his next novel, which will be “Jaws without the shark”.)

Will has also written a piece in the FT about what he terms “everythingitis”, which he feels every time he finishes a book, and how he conducts his research. There’s also a long piece here that he wrote for the Guardian Review about modernism and how he got going as a writer.

Umbrella

Umbrella

Umbrella, was published in the UK by Bloomsbury on 16th August 2012. You can buy online at Amazon.co.uk.

Umbrella was published in the USA by Grove Press on January 8th 2013 – You can buy online at Amazon.com

“A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.” James Joyce, Ulysses

Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community – the so-called Concept House in Willesden – maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.

A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life – with wholly unforeseen consequences.

Is Audrey’s diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all – perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey’s two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive?

Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self’s most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.

Read an extract of Umbrella in PDF format on the Waterstones website.

Umbrella has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.

Umbrella
Umbrella.
UK: Order at Amazon.co.uk
USA: Order at Amazon.com

David Tennant To Appear In Adaptation Of A Will Self Short Story

Actor David Tennant, a former Doctor in Dr Who, will be playing the role of Will, a “witty, acerbic artist” in a one-off drama for Sky Arts based on “The Minor Character”, a short story by Will Self. “The Minor Character” was published in the collection The Undivided Self. Further details to follow.

You can find The Undivided Self at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

You can also listen to Will reading The Minor Character.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker

Penguin has just published an ebook of Will Self’s collected Real Meals columns, The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker, for the bargain price of £1.99. (This edition is currently only available in the UK – if it’s published in the USA we’ll add an update).

“Most food writing and restaurant criticism is concerned with the ideal, with how by cooking this, or dining there, you can somehow ingurgitate a new – or at any rate improved – social, aesthetic and even spiritual persona. I aimed to turn this proposition on its head, and instead of commenting on where and what people would ideally like to eat, I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and – most importantly – fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon in the go-round of their often hurried and dyspeptic lives.”

Walking to Hollywood: paperback of the year

The Independent has given Walking to Hollywood five stars in its paperbacks of 2011:

“The three essays collected in Walking to Hollywood are non-fictional travelogues that spiral slowly into abstraction, similar in many ways to the ‘psychogeography’ columns on which Will Self collaborated with Ralph Steadman.

“But here the tone is markedly different, the author’s usual Technicolor exuberance tempered by a monochrome melancholy. It is significant that Steadman’s illustrations have been displaced by the sort of black-and-white photographs beloved of WG Sebald; Self’s writing seems to have taken a darker turn under the German writer’s saturnine influence. Not that this book entirely lacks the old scatological mischief. Sebald, after all, is unlikely to have described car exhausts as ‘turbofarts’.”

Penguin Ink: The Book of Dave

Penguin has commissioned the tattoo artist Duncan X to redesign the book cover of Will Self’s The Book of Dave as part of its limited edition Penguin Ink series. To buy a copy for £10, visit the Penguin site here.

The Book of Dave
The new cover for The Book of Dave

New Bloomsbury book covers

Greg Heinimann at Bloomsbury has created a series of new book covers for Will Self’s back catalogue to coincide with the paperback publication of Walking to Hollywood (below) in September. The new covers are for My Idea of Fun, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Cock & Bull, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, Junk Mail, Grey Area, Great Apes and The Butt.

Read a short report about it in Creative Review here.

Walking to Hollywood paperback

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.

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