Will Self

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    • 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
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  • Appearances

My body & soul

November 19, 2009

Are you healthy?
“I have the same sign on my office door that Field Marshal Montgomery had outside his tent during the desert campaign; it reads ‘I am 99% fit, are you?’ I’ve always been pretty fit. Even when I was a heroin addict I was a fit heroin addict.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s answers from the Observer’s My body & soul here.

Aspen – the brand

November 19, 2009

“Last summer I was walking through an interminable caravan park atop a cliff in Norfolk when I began clocking the makes of the vans. There was the Windsor and the Coronation and the Aspen. Naturally, the Aspen, I said to myself as I plodded past its gemütlich net curtains, what could be better branding for a mobile home? The quaking aspen of North America – or Populus tremuloides – is noted for its spectacular autumnal display. The round leaves in myriad shades of red and yellow twist freely on their stalks, producing the heady illusion that the very earth itself is in motion. Oh yes, were I to be as free as Margaret Beckett, the Aspen would be the covered wagon for me.

“A few weeks later, I found myself in a friend’s kitchen while he was caramelising some sugar, and chanced to note the make of his gas cooker. It, too, was an Aspen. Aha, I thought to myself, that’s a pretty cool bit of branding for a hob – but the manufacturers are probably referencing the Colorado town rather than the tree. A Silver Boom mining camp that by 1893, within a decade of its foundation, boasted banks, a hospital, two theatres and electric lighting, Aspen was bust by the turn of the century. It didn’t resurge until after the Second World War, when it became a ski centre for the Rockies and subsequently an upscale tourist resort.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s The Madness of Crowds column, at the New Statesman, here.

Desert Crossing

November 18, 2009

From Adam & Eve Projects: “Will Self shuns Dubai’s manic road system in favour of navigating his way across the desert on foot. Will’s destination is the opulent desert oasis, Bab Al Shams Resort where he photographs and writes about his slightly alien adventure.”

My hero: JG Ballard

November 13, 2009

Will Self has written about JG Ballard for the Guardian’s Review section, published tomorrow, the day before what would have been Ballard’s 79th birthday. Read it here.

London – the city that you just can’t stereotype

November 12, 2009

“I was walking to the local post office one morning this week when I came across a policeman looking grimly at a large pile of car tyres that had been dumped in the gutter.

“‘You’re looking tired out,’ I quipped, but when he failed to smile I went on philosophically: ‘Well, that’s London for you.’

“‘No,’ he replied, still stony-faced. ‘That’s Stockwell.’

“I went on my way a little chagrined at his stereotyping of my neighbourhood, which, while it may have its problems, still deserves a less negative attitude from its law enforcers.

“But then it occurred to me that I was guilty of propagating a stereotype as well – and mine had been even broader, reducing the entire metropolis to a zone of petty crime.

“We all do it, though, don’t we: view this great and infinitely varied city through the reducing lens of stereotypy?

“I think it’s a coping mechanism: after all, if we stopped to consider the individuality of every single person we came across in a given day, we’d probably go crazy.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column here.

Starbucks: A double shot of sanctimony

November 12, 2009

“I visited the Pacific Northwest quite a bit in the early 1990s. Seattle struck me as having a definite coffee hue, just as many other cities have a predominant colour (the piss-green of Paris springs to mind). A coffee hue, and a coffee smell. Starbucks began frothing in the 1970s, and the chain was set to lash out across the US and then the world on the cusp of the 1990s. But this year, Starbucks’ CEO, Howard Schultz, announced that there would be significant closures among the approximately 700 Starbucks in the UK, and ruefully admitted that the business had expanded far too recklessly.

“I should cocoa. Time was when you couldn’t turn your back on a family-run cafe without the twin-tailed corporate siren – a logo, incidentally, that was once replaced with a crown to facilitate market penetration in the Islamic world, which was offended by the display of the female figure – snaffling it up. Starbucks operated at a loss, saturated local areas, doubled up franchise and company-owned outlets and exploited loopholes in planning laws. The headline in the US satire ‘zine, The Onion, said it all: ‘New Starbucks opens in restroom of existing Starbucks’.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Real Meals column at the New Statesman.

Where the Wilde things are

November 5, 2009

“I wonder what Monsieur Vigneron, a commissaire général de la Société des Artistes Français no less, makes of it all, assuming that the comings and goings have rendered his shade unquiet. After all, in 1903, when he was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, at the reasonable, if not advanced, age of 57, the notorious sodomite was yet to pitch up. M Vigneron’s tasteful tomb – a petrified catafalque, replete with rigid canvases and stony brushes – stood proud among the crumbling graves. Doubtless the Second Republic arts bureaucrat had some hopes of a few respectful mourners coming to lay fast-fading violets atop his remains, but a scant eight years later, down dropped this monstrous chunk of schizoid-modernism, designed by Jacob Epstein, which is half engine block, half pharaonic sphinx. Then things began to get weirder.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s The Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman website.

Real Meals: The Indian Restaurant

November 5, 2009

“I suppose I was looking for an archetype that no longer exists. A fusty realm of red flock wallpaper and piped sitar music. I was in search of that unreal establishment, the Indian restaurant – unreal because the vast majority are in fact run by Bangladeshis; but unreal also because, just as second- and third-generation British Asians no longer see any need to kowtow to ethnic indiscrimination (and so style their establishments ‘Bengali’, or as offering ‘Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine’), so they have also hearkened to the foodyism of the past decade, vamped up their decor and even begun flirting with the unsafe sex of gastronomy: fusion.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s Real Meals column, visit the New Statesman website.

Mobile phones: The Stockholm syndrome

October 22, 2009

“I vividly remember my first experience of hands-free mobile phones. It must have been around 1998 in Stockholm. I arrived by night, in the teeth of a blizzard, and distinctly shaken up by having flown from London sitting between the pilots of the SAS flight. I was, shamefully, on a press junket, and this was the only seat available. I wandered the concourses of Stockholm airport waiting for my onward connection and absolutely freaked by the numbers of soberly dressed businessmen who strode about the place gesticulating and talking aloud, even though there was no one there.

“What was this, I wondered – the atavistic Scandinavian bicameral mind in action? Were these guys talking to Wotan, or were they schizophrenics? It took me a while to notice the little pigtails of flex dangling from their ears, then grasp that this was only the stringy extension of a communications revolution hell-bent on inverting private and public space. Ah! The mobile phone – how can we imagine life without it? (Well, if you’re, say, over 30, the answer is: with perfect clarity – after all, we can remember that carefree era of less paranoia and greater punctuality.) More specifically, what was civil society like before any fuckwit with a portable phone started believing that he or she had an inalienable right to yatter on in public, at inordinate length and as loudly as a trombonist?”

Read the rest of the latest The Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman.

Bird watching

October 17, 2009

Short piece by Self in the New York Times about English girls who put the “It” in Brit.

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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.

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