7 reader reviews

“Not one for the faint-hearted (if you’re easily offended, better steer clear of this one)! Self’s Londoners live weird existences that I feel would fit in very well with Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Probably Self would treat any attempt at analysis of his work with some disdain, but nevertheless I felt that (as usual) he was attempting to challenge the reader’s view of morality and sexuality. Self seemed to me to be saying that human sexuality (for that read sexual roles) is both ambiguous and mutable: the commonly-held view that all is black-and-white is nonsense, rather it’s all various shades of grey. I enjoyed the book immensely – it’s challenging, funny and disturbing……” – Mr. G. Rodgers

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7 reader reviews

“Very, very funny. The problem with Will Self is that he cannot write without being ultra-ironic and cool, but here it works. The stories (2 novellas), about a woman who grows a penis and rapes her husband, and a man who develops a vagina, could have been merely vulgar in the hands of a lesser writer. But Self writes with such linguistic variety, panache and humour that he lifts these stories to the level of highly intelligent satire. They are shocking, obscene and hugely enjoyable (plus they make some very interesting observsations about gender along the way).” – A Reader

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Michiko Kakutani, September 1999

“His first book to be published in the United States, “Cock & Bull,” consists of two comic novellas, both based on the time-honored theme of metamorphoses. The result, however, owes less to Ovid or Kafka than to William Burroughs and scores of naughty schoolboys caught snickering in the lavatory about sex and bodily functions.

Just what sort of metamorphosis occurs in “Cock & Bull”? To put it bluntly, the first story features a woman who sprouts a penis; the second concerns a man who grows a vagina behind his knee. What is the point of these peculiar transformations? Presumably Mr. Self intends to satirize a “world in which social and sexual characteristics were already being tossed and dressed like salad,” a world in which politically correct graduate students drone on about “phallocentrism” and “waitrons,” a world in which women try to run with wolves and men are told to find their inner children. “”

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