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
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  • Radio and Audio
  • Television
  • Appearances
  • Book Will Self For An Event

Bergson grants

April 4, 2010

The Times recently asked Will Self “What would you do if you were Culture Secretary?”, and this is what he said:

“There’s too much substandard art, and while not going to the lengths of Goering and reaching for my gun at the sound of the word ‘culture’, it’s difficult not to want to shoot the numskulls, hacks, wannabes and no-hopers responsible for it. Henri Bergson thought that aspiring writers should be offered grants to persuade them not to write. A discriminating culture secretary should offer a whole range of Bergson grants to artists, writers, film-makers and theatrical impresarios to encourage them not to produce. True, it would cost a lot of money to get Andrew Lloyd Webber to not open a new musical, but it would be money well spent.”

My search for a grown-up soft drink

March 20, 2010

“I think it ill behoves recovering alcoholics – among whose number I include myself – to complain about the mores of the great drinking majority. After all, we’ve had our fill, and we’d be well advised to shut up and take our sparkling mineral water like the good men and women we’d like to become.

“But then … there’s the use of that verb – drinking – to indicate alcohol drinking without any modifier being required; it’s tough living in a society where the very act of imbibing is synonymous with intoxication, and all the harder because the available alternative drinks aren’t so much soft as sugary gloop suitable only for inducing fits in preteens (or mixing with teens’ and kidults’ vodka).”   More...

World Book Day choices

March 17, 2010

For World Book Day, Will Self was asked by the Times which book he’d like to give and receive:

“One to give: I would like to give JR Ackerley’s My Father and Myself to the entire Tory shadow cabinet. While ostensibly fashioning a memoir of a late Victorian bourgeois paterfamilias, Ackerley – who was arts editor for The Listener – turned out what is probably the most subversive book about British social mores and social hierarchy ever written. Both Ackerleys served in the Army, JR fought in the first world war, his father had served in the Guards and was a respected importer of bananas. However, Ackerley fils was gay, while Ackerley père was a bisexual former rent boy and a bigamist to boot. The brilliance of this book is that – rather like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That – it shows how tissue-thin the narrative of power and ‘respectable’ class-consciousness always has been. The likes of David Cameron should read this book and think again if they believe hegemony to be part of their birthright.   More...

War of the Worlds

January 28, 2010

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, Penguin asked authors to name their favourite from its classics backlist. Will Self explains why he picked HG Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Self has also written about the “significance of catastrophe books” on the Penguin website.

Massive Attack

January 27, 2010

Still on a Bristol theme, Self has written about Massive Attack’s new album, Heligoland, for the Sunday Times, which can be read here.

Sebald 2010 lecture

January 27, 2010

For all those of you asking to see Will Self’s Sebald lecture, it’s now available on the Times website here, not just in the TLS. Enjoy it while there’s no paywall … or you can listen to it here.

For those of you who can read German, there’s also an interesting review of the lecture by Gina Thomas at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Werner Herzog interview

August 13, 2009

An interview with the German – or, more specifically, Bavarian – director Werner Herzog, whose Encounters at the End of the World is out now.

Four Werner Herzog moments:

1. The opening sequence of his 1972 film Aguirre, Wrath of God, so astonishingly other for a teenager in the acrid darkness of a 1970s London cinema. I remember the porcelain face of the Madonna in her glass box, then the camera reverse-zooming, so that we see the conquistadors strung out along the jungle path. Back and back the camera pulls, revealing more and more immensities of mountain. It’s a perfect image: the European invaders, with their religious baggage, reduced to the status of ants crawling up a log.   More...

Wystan: a new short story

March 15, 2009

“Chloe dreamt that she was having sex with her father-in-law’s dog, Wystan, a particularly skinny and nervous whippet. The whippet’s claws scratched her shoulders and breasts terribly — his needle-sharp teeth nipped at her ears; what was going on down below Chloe could only intuit, not feel, but the idea alone sent alternating pulses of nausea and shame coursing through her subconscious.   More...

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Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Will
Will Self's latest book Will is published in hardback by Viking on 14 November 2019.

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

Will’s Previous Books

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
The Undivided Self
The Undivided Self
More info Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  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
   
Bloomsbury  
Penguin

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Recent Posts

  • Reconsidering cannabis and the law
  • On the Kardashians
  • Poetry Shack appearance
  • Celebrating 100 years of Eliot’s The Waste Land
  • The Ghost Landmarks of the East End
  • The Bomb Makes a Comeback
  • ‘The West gave Putin green card to invade’
  • Self on Sebald
  • Are the Oscars obsolete?
  • On misopedia: the British attitude to children

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