Will Self

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.

“Chloe awoke to find that her thrashing had threaded the heavy linen sheet through her thighs and wound it around her waist. She freed herself from this loincloth, while disentangling dream and reality, then, pushing herself upright in the old four-poster, she realised that she was not alone: a dagger of sunlight thrust between the shutters, lanced across the room and caught on its very point, standing, shivering in the empty grate of the fireplace … ”

To read the rest of Will Self’s short story, published in the Sunday Times today, go here.

Embrace the signs of ageing

“My mother always spoke, not contemptuously, but pityingly of those men who ditched their partners of long-standing in favour of a younger model. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she’d say. ‘At every stage of my life I’ve really only been attracted to men of my own age.’ Of course, some may say that this is all a matter of taste: there are those who relish a disparity in age just as there some who are drawn to others from different countries, or of different races. I’m not so sure; after all, if the analogy were really to obtain, we would have to concede that by and large our culture promotes one ethnic stereotype of beauty – because most certainly that is the case when it comes to age.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s Big Issue article about ageing, go here.

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”.

Oxford Street is jammed but I’m proud to travel by bus

“The splendidly named Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas is at it again, using her New West End Company — basically a shopkeepers’ association — to campaign for fewer buses on Oxford Street, Bond Street and Regent Street. True, her stated aim is to make the area more pedestrian-friendly but, I wonder, what sort of pedestrians does she have in mind?

“Not, you understand that we omnibus-lovers have anything to be ashamed of. After the dark days of the Eighties, when Thatcher proclaimed that anyone over 30 who was still riding the bus was, ipso facto, a failure, these red clippers on the tarmac ocean have enjoyed a surprising comeback. Now, thanks in no small measure to Ken Livingstone, the service in London is both frequent and — more importantly — used by the very acmes of success, such as myself.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column — which also includes incredulity at the £10 million Costa coffee taster and Stella McCartney’s “leather-effect” boots and the endless novelty of discovering London on foot, this time from Shepperton to Heathrow airport — here.

The IRA didn’t die, it was supplanted by al-Qaeda

“If a week is a long time in politics, then a decade must be aeons. So it seemed to those of us who had followed Northern Irish politics during the 1970s and 80s, when, post-9/11, the archetypal terrorist became a Muslim. Or, to put it more strongly, for some people terrorist – or at any rate, terrorist sympathiser – and Islamic became synonymous.

“And then, after the 7/7 London bombings, the equivalence became even more complete because these weren’t just shadowy foreigners but our very own home-grown killers.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column, go here.

Title fight

You can watch Will Self on the BBC’s Money Programme here, first broadcast last night, talking about the book publishing industry.

Julie Myerson, a suitable case for treatment

“I was once on a panel that gave a prestigious award to Julie Myerson for her first novel, Sleepwalking, an elegantly overwrought account of an abused woman who begins a passionate affair. Myerson has said there are autobiographical elements to it, but if so they were properly obfuscated by the routine devices of fiction. She since seems to have forgotten that all good fiction is a form of psychic autobiography: there’s no need to give such revelations the seeming authority of fact, when fiction speaks with greater authenticity.

“In the intervening decade and a half, Myerson has carved herself a literary career using the actualité of her own life for copy. This writerly cannibalism has now reached a grim apotheosis, with the author herself pre-puffing her latest book, The Lost Child, with revelations of how she and her husband exiled their eldest child from the family home because of his addiction to marijuana.”

To read the rest of this column, go here.

What texting owes to the literary enlightenment

Chris Addison explores the links between modern-day text-speak and the language of the 18th-century literary enlightenment. He examines the expressive elements of text language, or “textese”, and how it can be seen to echo a ludic art form that became popular in the Romantic era, via insights found in the letters of Jonathan Swift and later works by Lewis Carroll and James Joyce.

The programme will be broadcast on March 10, Radio 4 at 11.30am and will feature contributions from Will Self and Ian Rankin, the poet Scott Tyrell and professors Jeremy Tambling, John Sutherland and David Crystal.

Flagellating Sir Fred will not save Gordon Brown

“It’s not just Harriet Harman, it’s the whole tarnished gang of New Labour ministers that make me feel that I’ve stepped into a time machine and been whisked back three millennia to ancient Judea. If these Pharisees had their way, Sir Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin would be wearing a pair of goat’s horns as he was herded, bleating furiously, over a nearby cliff.

“True, the High Priest Gordon Brown and his Archimandrite Jacqui Smith have moved to distance themselves from Harman’s more outrageous assertion that retroactive legislation might be employed to shear the Goodwin’s golden fleece, but our so-called leaders remain wedded to the idea that they can somehow maintain their own authority by scapegoating the bankers.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s First Post column here.

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.

If you want to get in touch, you can email us at info@will-self.com

All email will be read, but we can’t guarantee a response.

PR agencies, please DO NOT put this email address on any mailing lists.

If you have a specific request for Will regarding commissions, book rights etc, you can contact his agent via agent@will-self.com

Will’s Writing Room

Will's Writing Room
– a 360 degree view in 71 photos

Recent Posts