Will Self’s story set in Bushy Park, London, for the Royal Parks series of short stories that take their inspiration from London’s Royal Parks, is now available here for £2.
Wystan: a new short story
“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.
Coming soon: A wildly eccentric tail
In this week’s Sunday Times Will Self “sends up the aristocracy in a wildly eccentric tale about an heir who, when he can’t father a son, looks to his trusty whippet for a helping hand”.
Bushy Park
You can find a Guardian news story about Will Self’s short story celebrating Bushy Park here, one of London’s royal parks, which is due to be published in May, and also Nicholas Lezard’s blog on it too.
A Visit from Mrs Wells
Breaking down the micro-worlds
Fascinating reading and lecture from Will at the Google HQ in California. Will talks about psychogeography, Debords’s The Society of the Spectacle, the Romantics’ framing of beauty and how we can break out of mediated forms of experience, that takes in Laurence Stern, micro-worlds and the development of boulevards. The reading is from his latest book, Psychogeography, and is about his experience at US Customs.
The Gesture. A new short story
The Gesture
It was one of those things that married people come to loathe about their spouses with a deep and passionate intensity, along with the timbre of their coughs, their tipsy giggles, the particular, guilty creaks with which they ascend the stairs. In Holly’s case, it was the dismissive flick of thumb and index finger, with which Brion indicated that the subject was closed. That he wasn’t going to come out with them to lunch – and that he didn’t wish to talk to her anymore.
The Book Of Revelations – Salon Audio 2000
“Self recently wrote an introduction to one of the Pocket Canons, the series of new versions of the King James Bible introduced by great writers and published by Cannongate Press. Self introduces the Book of Revelation with his own take on technology, religion and the millennium.”
This is an audio recording of Self reading his introduction
Return To The Planet Of The Humans
[This short story was first published in Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe]
Will Self – Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
Then he was back, suddenly and savagely. Not that he knew he was back, he simply found himself in a room full of monsters, lanky, pasty giants clad in disgusting nether garments, who, rather than beat him compassionately into stability, kept their distance and moaned. Their vocalisations were so low and febrile, so ghostly. They made no signs that he could comprehend and when he could bear it no longer he attacked.
