Catharton.com is an excellent literary resource. It’s a website that provides a directory of links on hundreds of different authors, each author getting their own page. Catharton also hosts many discussion forums about each specific author, including the Catharton Will Self discussion forum.
Things To Do In Dulston When You’re Dead – Will Self How The Dead Live Eye.net interview 2000
Andre Mayer turns in a good piece on Self for Canadian magazine Eye Weekly:
“It has always been interesting to me to create a completely alternative set of worlds for my fiction to take place in,” Self admits in a phone interview from his home in London. “It’s so much more interesting to write about something that is both real and seemingly unreal. It places the reader in a state of questioning about reality itself.”
Too true. Self’s version of the great beyond — like his myriad spins on life — is by turns ridiculous and banal. The afterlife is governed by the shadowy Deathocracy, which, as you’d expect, is an agency of do-nothing buffoons. Meanwhile, Dulston’s deceased inhabitants still hold jobs. They go about their normal daily functions — eating, smoking, shagging — despite the fact that all their senses are impaired, which seems to be Self’s way of saying that modern life has gotten cruelly perfunctory. It’s inspired satire from a writer who is notoriously acidic, but Self insists the message behind How the Dead Live has been largely misread.
“I’ve read review after review about how this is a book that proposes that when you die in London, you move to a strange, crepuscular suburb called Dulston,” Self says, quick to dispel the novel’s alleged universality: “This isn’t what the book says at all. This book is about what happens to Lily Bloom when she dies. This is her death, and the levels of reality that are contained within the book are connected to her psyche.”
How The Dead Live – The Digested Read
The Guardian’s condensed send-up of How The Dead Live’s plotline.
The condensed version of the condensed version is particularly good:
“Reworking of the fucking Tibetan Book of the Dead in which Lily Bloom lives, dies and finds some form of fucking redemption”
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
How The Dead Live – Salon Audio 2001
Self reads an extract of his novel How The Dead Live for Salon Audio
Great Apes Interview – Salon Magazine 1997
“Considering his past antics, Self had to do something pretty special to whip up interest in “Great Apes” — and coyly confessing to shooting skag on the Major’s plane definitely qualified. If there were any doubts about Self’s motives, they were answered by his publicists, who thoughtfully included an array of clippings on the campaign heroin incident and his junkie past in the “Great Apes” press kit.
This wasn’t the first of Self’s media manipulations. When he first appeared on the literary scene over five years ago, the word got out that he was a hoax, possibly a front for some extracurricular writing by his friend Martin Amis. It didn’t hurt the mini-controversy that Self, in interviews, seemed much more interested in discussing his Nintendo scores than his writing. Self’s career has further benefited from high-class logrolling on his book jackets, where Amis, Nick Hornby, Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard and the Sunday Times regularly sing his praises. (Some of these blurbs are somewhat underwhelming: of “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” Hornby negligibly trumpeted “There isn’t anything like this in British fiction.”)
Self has often stated his admiration for playwright Dennis Potter and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who both used terminal illnesses to focus the British media on their final testaments. Self wants the same kind of glory, and has done his best to make sure he doesn’t have to die to get it.”
Alasdair Gray – 1982, Janine
Will Self wrote an introduction for the Canongate edition of Alasdair Gray’s book.
Synopis:
An unforgettably challenging book about power and powerlessness, men and women, masters and servants, small countries and big countries, Alasdair Gray’s exploration of the politics of pornography has lost none of its power to shock. Disliked by some and praised by others, 1982 Janine is a searing portrait of male need and inadequacy, as explored via the lonely sexual fantasies of Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and business man. Yet there is hope here, too, and the humour (if black) and the imaginative and textual energy of the narrative achieves its own kind of redemption in the end.
You can buy Janine, 1982 at Amazon.co.uk
Addicted To Transmogrification – Will Self 2001 Guardian interview
Nicholas Wroe interviews Will Self in the wake of How The Dead Live’s publication:
“Looking back, Self thinks that getting his first book accepted was the high point of his literary career. “By this time I had children to support, but more than that, at a personal level, it was enormously liberating knowing I could do this thing. Whether out of anxiety or productivity, I just didn’t want to stop doing it.”
In the decade since he has produced four novels, another two collections of stories, a pair of linked novellas, a book of collected non-fiction and, last year, a meditation on masculinity that focused on the case history of a transsexual. His most recent novel, How the Dead Live , is published in paperback this month. It echoes one of his earliest and best short stories, “The North London Book of the Dead”, in which a young man has the unsettling experience of meeting his recently deceased mother in Crouch End.
“I was very interested in writing about this idea of what it was like for materialistic, atheistic people to die with no sense of spiritual transcendence,” he explains. “I’d seen my mother and, to a degree, my father, die like that, and it had a profound effect on me. In order to write a book that would do justice to the subject, I realised that my own lifestyle, which at that point was completely mired in active addiction, would have to change. So in a sense the book became something of a vehicle of recovery, and possibly even redemption, for me.” ”
How The Dead Live – Penguin Books interview with Will Self
To celebrate the paperback release of How the Dead Live, Will Self’s inventive, savage meditation on life after death, Penguin have rejacketed several of Will’s books with stunning new artwork from some of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists.
In an exclusive interview, we asked Will his thoughts on everything from drug addiction and Jewishness to the disintegration of the soul.
You’re involved with many things; journalism, short-stories, novels. Do you regard these as being quite different activities?
I’ve always thought of myself as a writer first and foremost, the whole business of my work is to mediate the world through language, whatever form that language takes. However, that being said, my heart lies in a particular kind of fiction, fiction of the alternative world. The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
You display an interest in science fiction, and in the writing of JG Ballard. Was this your childhood reading?
As a child I absolutely gorged myself on sci-fi, I’d eat it in great truckles and sort of chewed it up, I could not get my hands on enough of the stuff. There are certain writers who are kind of science fiction, but something more, like J G Ballard, arguably even somebody like Robert Heinlein and Philip K Dick. I ate these along with the whole mush and brew.
Penguin Books – Readers Q&A
We gave you the chance to query Will Self on all things literary. Here, Will answers your questions.
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