Will Self

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The Quantity Theory Of Insanity

January 15, 2006

The Quantity Theory Of Insanity - Will Self
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Synopsis:
Mother crops up dead but talking in Crouch End; a cellular telephone scam ends in drugged psychosis; a mental ward captivates then captures an art therapist; motorcycle messengers mystically intuit London traffic flows. These are some of the stories featured in this collection.

The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis

January 15, 2006

The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis - Will Self
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Synopsis:
It looks like it is going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, a Christmas powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded, as trapped in the bosom of the nastiest, most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts.

Junk Mail

January 15, 2006

Junk Mail - Will Self
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Synopsis:
Will Self’s collected journalism and writings. Most of the pieces are centred around the subject of drugs and the counter-culture. Pieces range from an article on crack dealers in the East End called “New Crack City” through to dialogues with Martin Amis, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard.

Grey Area

January 15, 2006

Grey Area - Will Self
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Synopsis:
These stories create a world of oddity superimposed on an ordinary world. They include six controllers running the whole of London life in all its minutiae; a nightmare tour of Soho where everyone professes to be a writer, and the discovery in 1000 years’ time of our strange motorway culture.

Cock And Bull

January 15, 2006

Cock And Bull
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Synopsis:
This black comedy is divided into two parts. In the first a woman grows a penis and rapes her husband. In the second a man grows a vagina behind his knee and is then seduced by his doctor.

Cock And Bull was first published in 1992.

Cock And Bull Reviews:

  • The New York Times
  • Amazon.co.uk Reader Reviews
  • Amazon.com Reader Reviews
  • Wikipedia

Great Apes

January 15, 2006

Great Apes - Will Self
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Synopsis:
When artist Simon Dykes wakes after a late night of routine debauchery, he discovers that his world is irretrievably changed. His girlfriend, Sarah, has turned into a chimpanzee. And, to Simon’s appalled surprise, so has the rest of humanity.

Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys

January 15, 2006

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Will Self – Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys

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Synopsis:
A London-based collection of stories including recent Will Self stories like “The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz” and “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis’.

How The Dead Live

January 15, 2006

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Will Self – How The Dead Live

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Synopsis:
The extraordinary story of a 65-yr-old woman who lies dying in a London hospital. As she’s in the process of being ferried across to the other world (which turns out to be remarkably like this one), she reflects on her husbands, her children, her entire life. Brilliant and witty as always, Self has this time written a novel that carries a huge emotional punch in its portrait of a wonderful middle-aged woman – based apparently on his mother.

Dorian

January 15, 2006

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Will Self – Dorian

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Synopsis:
It is 1981 and the “Royal Broodmare”, as Henry Wotton calls her, is about to be married. Wotton, a homosexual, and his friend Baz have found a remarkable young man Dorian Gray, the epitome of male beauty. Sixteen years later, how does Dorian remain so youthful?

Book Review: Killing Pablo: the hunt for the richest, most powerful criminal in history

January 13, 2006

Will Self reads a life of Pablo Escobar, the most notorious dope dealer of modern times, and recalls his own adventures in the land of addiction

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Mark Bowden – Killing Pablo

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“I’ve got cocaine running around my brain!” So chanted Dillinger, the reggae toaster, in a mid-1970s paean to the white stuff that was an instant hit with those of us adolescent delinquents intent on an instant hit. Dillinger wasn’t the first or the last reggae star to take his moniker from a famous outlaw, but his cheerful little ditty was a curtain-raiser on a quarter-century during which the only criminal act in the global village worth talking about has been the production, export and sale of drugs.

At the tail-end of Mark Bowden’s impressively single-minded account of the hunt and execution of Pablo Escobar, the most notorious dope dealer of our era, one consumption statistic is belatedly supplied. In the year of Escobar’s death, 1993, the best estimate is that between 243 and 340 tonnes of cocaine were sold in the United States alone, and it is further estimated that Americans paid $30.8bn for the white powder.

But we all know this already: the cocaine trade is full of lines, more damned lines, and statistics. When I began doing cocaine regularly in the late Seventies, a gramme cost between £70 and £80. The quality was variable, a lot was pharmaceutical (obtained by break-ins on chemists), but much of it was still smuggled into Britain by individual freebooters, often rough bits of posh. I knew at least a couple of old Etonians who regularly jetted off to Bogota, picked up a key, and brought it back through customs tucked in the capacious crotches of their Turnbull & Asser green corduroy trousers. This is the kind of penny-ante trafficking glorified by Robert Sabbag in his autobiographical Snowblind. In those days, sniffing a line was, erroneously, perceived as the preserve of Studio 54 jet-setters and ageing roues, hangovers from some unhappy valley of interwar Arcadia.

In fact, cocaine had always been part of drug addiction, and remained so. In my early days, I encountered older addicts who could recall being prescribed injectable cocaine in “jacks” (small, soluble, pure cubes of the drug) under the medical maintenance model of treatment that used to prevail in Britain. These addicts were part of the criminalised core of drug users who, when cocaine increased in availability, became the early adopters, first of freebasing (precipitating a smokeable salt of cocaine by mixing it with ether or acetone) and then of crack (doing the same thing with bicarbonate of soda).

Those of us who had used cocaine intravenously were not at all surprised by the intense effects of the drug when inhaled. The big distinction between sniffing coke and smoking or fixing it is the speed with which it is absorbed into the brain; with sniffing, it takes three or four minutes; with smoking or fixing, it takes around six seconds. This produces a huge rush, which is followed almost immediately by a profound comedown. The only way to get back up is to take another hit, but because your tolerance has already been hugely increased, you require more to produce the same effect, and more and more ad infinitum. Except that nobody can afford an infinite amount of cocaine, even though I estimate, with my own, back-of-the-envelope methods, that the street price of the drug is now less than 30 per cent of what it was a quarter-century ago.

It isn’t solely that crack cocaine is in and of itself highly addictive that makes it such a devastating drug in our society; it’s more that it acts as a turbo-charger on people who have addictive personalities. In circles of recovering drug addicts, I often hear my peers say they are “grateful” to crack, because it so accelerated their own addictive disease that they had no choice but to stop – or else die. However, even on this bobsleigh run of toxicity, there is still plenty of lying, stealing, violence and psychosis. Crack has winnowed out whole urban communities, both in the US and now here, like some bizarre plague of ephemeral pleasure; a grotesque synecdoche of rapacious, global capitalism, which, in its reduction of all of a human’s life to the business of meaningless consumption, exactly enshrines William Burroughs’s adage that addictive drugs are a perfect commodity, because instead of selling them to people, you sell people to them.

But you won’t find much about the effects of cocaine – either sociological or existential – in Killing Pablo. If you want to understand the former, I urge you to read Land of Opportunity: one family’s quest for the American dream in the age of crack by William Adler (which was published by Atlantic Monthly Press in the US, but is now sadly out of print). This is a coruscating account of the family that dominated the Detroit crack business during the epidemic years of the early 1980s, and how they did it using good old American business know-how. If you want to understand the existential effects, I modestly offer my own account of a crack cocaine rush in my short story “The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz”.

No, what Bowden excels at in this tome is a long, painstaking investigation into the tough tough boys and their tough tough toys, who fought in the Eighties and early Nineties to control the Colombian cocaine trade. This book is ostensibly a blow-by-blow account of the political shenanigans, corruption, compromise and murder, that led to Escobar’s execution (which was in all probability delivered in cold blood by a bullet to the brain, possibly even fired by an American Special Services operative). But the real pay-off for the entire exercise comes with Bowden’s remarks about the head of the American Drug Enforcement Agency station in Colombia in the wake of the killing: “Toft worried that they had created a monster. They had opened a bridge between the Colombian government, its top politicians and generals, and the Cali cartel that would be difficult, if not impossible, to close down.”

And so, indeed, it has proved to be. In the hunt to kill Escobar, the North American narco-warriors suborned still further the civil law and democracy of Colombia, a nation already devastated by years of political violence and extremism. By encouraging the Colombians to use the sicarios (hired killers) of the country’s other powerful drug cartel to pick off and murder Escobar’s Medellin people, the CIA, the FBI, Delta Force, Centra Spike and all the other shadowy American agencies who pitched in on the War Against Drugs acted as midwives to that monster.

Bowden’s account of the rise to power of the man known in his native city as “El Doctor” is thoroughly researched. His uncovering of the inter-agency feuding that surrounded the hunt for him is exemplary. His detailing of technological toys employed to hunt Escobar down is exhaustive. With Escobar on the run (and heavily protected by a populace to whom he was a folk hero), the only way he could be located was by using sophisticated listening devices capable of picking up the signals from the mobile phones and radios he used to communicate with his organisation. At one time, three American agencies had their spy planes aloft over Medellin. Bowden provides a convincing and systematic account of why Colombian political culture proved so tragically vulnerable to the corruption the cocaine trade brought with it.

But what is most bizarre about Killing Pablo is the consuming, ravening narrative hole in the text. Reading it is like watching Jaws without the shark. Apart from a couple of offhand remarks about wealthy Yanks wasting their money on marching powder, there is absolutely no cocaine in the book at all. If you came to this book without any background knowledge, I think you’d be genuinely flummoxed as to what all the fuss was about. You certainly don’t discover from its pages the extent of the cocaine problem in Colombia itself (catastrophic, unsurprisingly).

And this matters. Just as the futility of US policy should, by rights, adumbrate the whole sorry story – yet is revealed only at the denouement – so the psychic and cultural reality of the drug itself is crucial. Ploughing my way through Killing Pablo, I was reminded of Howard Marks’s autobiography, Mr Nice, which, while ostensibly about hashish smuggling, was so freighted with tedious detail about dates, numbers and quantities that it could just as easily have been the life story of an accountant. I have every expectation that Killing Pablo will do just as well commercially as Marks’s book did: they both fulfill a vital need among the reading public for drug-free books about drugs.

4th June 2001

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Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Why Read
Will Self's latest book Why Read will be published in hardback by Grove on 3 November 2022.

You can pre-order at Amazon.co.uk.

Will’s Previous Books

Will Self - Will
Will
More info
Amazon.co.uk

  Will Self - Phone
Phone
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Shark
Shark
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Umbrella
Umbrella
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
More info
Amazon.co.uk
  Walking To Hollywood
Walking To Hollywood
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Butt
The Butt
More info Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Grey Area
Grey Area
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Junk Mail
Junk Mail
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Great Apes
Great Apes
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Cock And Bull
Cock And Bull
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
More info

Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  My Idea Of Fun
My Idea Of Fun
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
The Book Of Dave
The Book Of Dave
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Psychogeography
Psychogeography
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Psycho Too
Psycho II
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Liver
Liver
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
How The Dead Live
How The Dead Live
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Dorian
Dorian
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Feeding Frenzy
Feeding Frenzy
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  Sore Sites
Sore Sites
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Perfidious Man
Perfidious Man
More info
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
  The Undivided Self
The Undivided Self
More info Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Bloomsbury  
Penguin

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