Will Self

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LRB Diary: On cocaine

October 29, 2015

Will Self has written a Diary piece for this week’s London Review of Books, which can be found here (you can subscribe or register for free to read the whole article).

David Cronenberg’s Consumed

June 12, 2015

A long review of David Cronenberg’s debut novel, Consumed, by Will Self can be read at the LRB website here (you will need to be a subscriber or register for free for a trial to read this in full).

On Patrick Keiller

January 22, 2014

There’s a 4,000 word essay that Will Self has written about Patrick Keiller and his new book, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes, at the London Review of Books website here. Will is going to be talking about Guy Debord with Patrick at the LRB bookshop in London tomorrow and there should be a podcast available soon after to listen to.

Battersea Power Station

July 18, 2013

“‘Rome completely bowled me over!’ Hitler declared on returning to Germany after his 1938 state visit to Italy. Mussolini had laid on a grand night-time tour that climaxed in a visit to the Colosseum, which – according to Christopher Woodward in his excellent In Ruins – ‘was lit from inside by red lamps so that, as if ablaze, it cast a bloody glow on to the grass and the ruddy brick ruins on the surrounding slopes.’ Descanting to Albert Speer, his pet pseudo-classical architect, Hitler explained that ‘ultimately, all that remained to remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture … What then remained of the emperors of the Roman Empire? What would give evidence of them today, if not their buildings?’

I often think of Hitler and his ‘Theorie vom Ruinwert’ – that only stone and brick should be used in Nazi buildings – when I gaze on the four great towers of Battersea Power Station. True, they are cast from ferroconcrete, the perishable material the Theorie sought to proscribe; and the underlying structure of the power station is welded from steel girders that would have been just as unacceptable to Hitler, but I feel the huge expanse of brickwork that clads the grand foursquare hulk would surely gladden his hypertrophying heart, as would the prodigious quantities of stone that line the stairwells leading up to its marble-lined control room. What he would make of the hundred-foot-long control desk, finished in enough walnut burl to furnish the dashboards of a thousand Jaguars, I have no idea, but overall I think the spectacle of Battersea, now on the brink of its fourth decade of ruination, would please him.

“Woodward observes that Hitler – when it came to ruins at least – was a glass-half-full kind of guy. To him, the Colosseum’s sheer endurance made it a worthy monument to imperial ambition, one he wished to emulate with buildings that would also last a thousand years – although presumably he hoped they’d survive in better nick. Of course, by the standards of Rome and Luxor’s stonework – let alone Çatalhöyük’s – the Battersea brick pile is absurdly youthful. Still, I’d like to propose a sort of ruination coefficient based on variables of age, size and location, by which measure Battersea would rank alongside these far more ancient structures: the defunct power station, while only fully commissioned in 1955, is absolutely fucking huge (given a big enough counterweight you could lower St Paul’s into its now roofless turbine hall), and it’s also slap-bang in the middle of London.”

Read the rest of Will’s Diary piece at the London Review of Books (where you can register for free for a short while).

Beyond Kafka’s Wound

October 2, 2012

Will Self discusses a range of issues provoked by his digital essay Kafka’s Wound at thespace.lrb.co.uk with Nicholas Spice and Helen Jeffrey from the London Review of Books, and Dan Franklin, Digital Publisher at Random House.

Is this unique digital essay a proto-form for a new type of deeper engagement with long form content on the web? What can modernism tell us about the digital storm sweeping through our world? How might collaborative digital authorship move forward? What next?

Digital essay on Kafka

August 9, 2012

Will Self’s “digital essay” on Kafka has been published in its entirety at the Space website, and includes an hour-long video of his trip to Prague and readings of Kafka’s “A Country Doctor”. For a short explanation of this unique London Review of Books commission, go here or visit thespace.org or @thespacearts for more details.

Kafka’s Wound

May 30, 2012

Will Self is blogging here about a digital essay he’s writing, Kafka’s Wound, commissioned by the London Review of Books, which will be launched on The Space website.

His essay will examine his personal relationship to Kafka’s work through the lens of the short story “A Country Doctor” (1919), and in particular through the aperture of the wound described in that story.

The essay is being “through composed” with Will’s own thoughts, as he works, being responded to by digital-content providers – many of whom are colleagues of his at Brunel University. The entire digital essay will go live in July.

There’s also a news story about the wider project at the Guardian here.

Also, tomorrow at City University in London from 5pm to 7pm, Will is going to be part of a panel discussing the difficulties inherent in translation, with particular reference to the aforementioned Kafka story. For more details go here.

Owen Hatherley: Trot on the landscape

February 29, 2012

Here’s Will Self’s long review of Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain in the LRB.

Walking out of London

October 18, 2011

“In the first few years of the last decade I undertook a series of what I called – with a nod to Iain Sinclair’s circumambulation of London – ‘radial walks’. These were tramps of between three and five days from my home near the city’s centre out into its hinterland, following either a cardinal or an ordinal point of the compass, depending on
which direction most appealed to me at the time. The first of these walks took me northeast up the Lea Valley, through Epping Forest, then followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to arrive at Harwich.

“I had never met anyone who had walked all the way from central London to the countryside – indeed, apart from my ten-year-old son, of whom more shortly, I still haven’t – and before that initial outing I seriously doubted whether or not it was possible. I feared the city’s surly gravity would prove too much for me, or that a bizarre bucolic force field would hurl me back somewhere in the region of the M25. Cyril Connolly, himself not a notable hiker, once said that no city should be so large that a man could not walk out of it in a morning. London, while by no means on a par with the megacities of the emergent East or Africa, still takes a very long day to egress on foot: if you leave at around 7am, and are reasonably fit, you may find yourself in open fields late that evening.

“Following Connolly, what this says about London I’m not absolutely sure: all I do know is that after doing a couple of these radial walks – first northeast, then due south – I was altogether more grounded in the city of my birth. Like some migratory creature that orients itself by sensitivity to the earth’s magnetic field, I felt for the first time in my life that I actually knew where I was. Of course, the radial walks, like my airport walks – which involved walking to a London airport, flying overseas then walking at the other end – were also a therapy devised by me to try and cope with my increasing alienation from mass transit systems and that reification of place itself which is the final redoubt of consumerism.

“Needless to say it was a therapy that didn’t work – or, rather, as with a narcotic habit, I seemed to require bigger and bigger hits of distance in order to achieve the same localising effect. My last radial walk was a mournful northwestern peregrination to Oxford; my final airport walk, a curious hop, skip and limp from the late JG Ballard’s house in Shepperton to Heathrow Airport, where I enplaned for Dubai. In Dubai I dragged myself for two days across the overcooked city and then into the baking Empty Quarter, all the way dogged by a mounting depression. It seemed to me that in pitting my body against the slave-built gimcrack postmodernism of Dubai, I had lost: something inside me was broken, and I hung up my boots.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Diary in the LRB here (you can subscribe for free).

Aerotropolis review

April 21, 2011

“While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by jetting from terminal to terminal around the globe but never exiting through the door marked ‘arrivals’. Why? Because it is Lindsay’s belief that Kasarda is the most important urban theorist alive today, a man who has fully anticipated the shape the future city must have and who has moved to make it a reality.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s review of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay from the LRB here.

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Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Why Read
Will Self's latest book Why Read will be published in hardback by Grove on 3 November 2022.

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

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

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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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