Will Self is one of the contributors to Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard: 1967-2008, recently published by Fourth Estate. The author Ian Thomson chose it as his book of the year in the Observer: “Impeccably edited, the book serves as a valuable coda to the work of one of the strangest and most haunted imaginations in English literature.”

To buy a copy of Extreme Metaphors for £15 (RRP £25) at Amazon, go here.

There’s a very rare, highly collectible first edition copy of Will Self’s Slump, published in 1985, for sale on eBay here, signed by Will. The cartoon strip originally ran in the New Statesman.

The young man in the artisanal bread shop said I had met his wife yesterday and talked with her at length – of this I remembered nothing. He was an earnest soul, oval faced, blond, with slightly pointed ears – he wore a blouson jacket with a round collar.

As he went on and on about the conversation I had had with his wife I not only found myself unable to recall any details of it or her, but the entire milieu in which we were operating was indistinct and vague – was this an artisanal bakery or a bike shop? Certainly the young man had a bike – a heavy, shiny German one – and when his wife turned up she had a sit-up-and-beg Dutch model. Like her bike, she was taller than him. They stood talking to me, their front wheels clashing and the smell of rubber mingling with the fresh baked bread. They admitted they were getting divorced – and I told them it would be hard on their child – a five-year-old girl who was wandering about in the road.