Will Self Books In Order

Co*ck and Bull

‘Co*ck: A Novelette’ is the story of a woman who grows a fully functional pen*is. ‘Bull: A Farce’ is the story of a man who acquires a vagi*na and all its companion parts. There are, however, complications. Co*ck & Bull, the book that introduced an enfant terrible of English letters to an American audience, has quickly become a classic of blistering satire.

My Idea of Fun

Will Self has established himself as one of the most brilliant, daring, and inventive writers of his generation. My Idea of Fun is Will Self’s highly acclaimed first novel. The story of a devilishly clever international financier/marketing wizard and his young apprentice, My Idea of Fun is both a frighteningly dark subterranean exploration of capitalism run rampant and a wickedly sharp, technically acute display of linguistic pyrotechnics that glows with pure white hot brilliance. Ian Wharton is a very ordinary young man until he is taken under the wing of a gentleman known variously as Mr. Broadhurst, Samuel Northcliff, and finally and simply the Fat Controller. Loudmouthed, impeccably tailored, and a fount of bombastic erudition, the Fat Controller initiates Ian into the dark secrets of his arts of marketing, money, and the human psyche and takes Ian, and the reader, on a wild voyage around the edges of reality. As we careen into the twenty first century, Self perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our times: money is the only common language; consumerism, violence, and psychosis drug induced and otherwise prevail; and the human soul has become the ultimate product.

Great Apes

After a night of routine debauchery in London’s clubland, the artist Simon Dykes falls asleep only to wake up to find his girlfriend has been transmogrified into a chimp. Indeed the whole of London, though functioning normally, is run and inhabited by chimps. Can the great chimp doctor, Zack Busner, cure him of his illusion that he’s human? A wonderfully funny and clever novel that manages too to evoke great feelings of pity and sadness in the reader, this is in effect a meditation on how we treat animals.

How the Dead Live

Will Self has one of literature’s most astonishing imaginations, and in How the Dead Live his talent has come to full flower. Lily Bloom is an angry, aging American transplanted to England, now losing her battle with cancer. Attended by nurses and her two daughters lumpy Charlotte, a dour, successful businesswoman, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie Lily takes us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. From ’40s career girl to ’50s tippling adulteress to ’70s PR flak, Lily has seen America and England through most of a century of riotous and unreal change. And then it’s over. Lily catches a cab with her death guide, Aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, and enters the shockingly banal world of the dead: the suburbs. She discovers smoking without consequences and gets another PR job, where none of her coworkers notices that she’s not alive. She gets to know her roommates: Rude Boy, her terminally furious son who died in a car accident at age nine; Lithy, a fetus that died before she ever knew it existed; the Fats, huge formless shapes composed of all the weight she’s ever gained or lost. How the Dead Live is Will Self’s most remarkable and expansively human book, an important, disturbing vision of our time.

Dorian

The New York Times Book Review has praised Will Self as a ‘high powered satirical weapon’ and an ‘alpha male in the British literary hierarchy.’ Now he confirms his place among our most important writers by offering a stunning reimagination of the most shocking novel of its time. Summer, 1981. It is an age when appearances matter more and more. Only the shallowest people won’t judge by them. Henry Wotton, gay, drug addicted, and husband of Batface, the irrefutably aristocratic daughter of the Duke of This or That, is at the center of a clique dedicated to dissolution. His friend Baz Hallward, an artist, has discovered a young man who is the very epitome of male beauty Dorian Gray. His installation, Cathode Narcissus, captures all of Dorian‘s allure and, perhaps, something else. After a night of debauchery that climaxes in a veritable conga line of buggery, Wotton and Hallward are caught in the hideous web of a retrovirus that becomes synonymous with the decade. Sixteen years later the Royal Broodmare, as Wotton has dubbed her, lies dying in a Parisian underpass. But what of Wotton and Hallward? How have they fared as stocks soar and T cell counts plummet? And what of Dorian? How is it that he remains so youthful while all around him shrivel and die? Set against the AIDS epidemic of the eighties and nineties, Will Self’s Dorian is a shameless reworking of our most significant myth of shamelessness, brilliantly evoking the decade in which it was fine to stare into the abyss, so long as you were wearing two pairs of Ray Bans.

The Book of Dave

When East End cabdriver Dave Rudman’s wife takes from him his only son, Dave pens a gripping text a compilation about everything from the environment, Arabs, and American tourists to sex, Prozac, and cabby lore that captures all of his frustrations and anxieties about his contemporary world. Dave buries the book in his ex wife s Hampstead backyard, intending it for his son, Carl, when he comes of age.

Five hundred years later, Dave s book is found by the inhabitants of Ham, a primitive archipelago in post apocalyptic London, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportions and the template for a new civilization. Only one islander, Symum, remains incredulous. But, after he is imprisoned for heresy, his son Carl must journey through the Forbidden Zone and into the terrifying heart of New London to find the only thing that will reveal the truth once and for all: a second Book of Dave that repudiates the first.

The Book of Dave is a profound meditation upon the nature of religion and a caustic satire of contemporary life.

The Butt

Tom Brodzinski is a man who takes his own good intentions for granted. But when he finally decides to give up smoking, a moment’s inattention to detail becomes his undoing. Flipping The Butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of the holiday apartment he’s renting with his family, Tom is appalled when it lands on the head of one his fellow countrymen, Reggie Lincoln. The elderly Lincoln is badly burnt, and since the cigarette butt passed through public space before hitting him, the local authorities are obliged to regard Tom’s action as an assault, despite his benign intentions. Worse is to follow: Lincoln is married to a native from one of the rigorous, mystical tribes of the desert interior, and their customary law is incorporated into the civil statute. In order to make reparations to Mrs Lincoln’s people, Tom will have to leave his family behind, and carry the appropriate goods and chattels deep into the arid heart of this strange, island continent. Any of this might be bearable, were it not for Tom’s companion, forced on him by his enigmatic lawyer, the mixed race Jethro Swai Phillips. Brian Prentice, like Tom, has to make reparations and although there is a taboo that prevents either man from knowing the exact detail of the other’s offence, Tom’s almost 100 certain that he’s a child abuser. As they drive into the desert and encounter a violent counter insurgency war that Tom has allowed himself to remain in ignorance of, the relationship between the two men becomes one of complicit guilt as well as seething mistrust. Refusing facile moral certitudes, Will Self’s latest novel is set in a distorted world, in a country that is part Australia, part Iraq, part Greeneland and part the heart of a distinctively modern darkness.

Walking to Hollywood

One of the most remarkably inventive voices of his generation, author Will Self delivers a new and stunning work of fiction. In Walking to Hollywood, a British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through L.A. freeways and eroding English cliffs, skewering celebrity as he attempts to solve a crime: who killed the movies. When Will reconnects with his childhood friend, the world suddenly seems disproportionate. Sherman Oaks, scarcely three feet tall at forty five, and his ironically sized sculptures replicas of his body varying from the gargantuan to the miniscule spark in Will a flurry of obsessive compulsive thoughts and a nagging desire to experience the world by foot. Ignoring his therapist and nemesis Zack Busner, Self travels to Hollywood on a mission to discover who or what killed the movies. Convinced that everyone from his agent, friends, and bums on the street are portrayed by famous actors, Self goes undercover into the dangerous world of celebrity culture. He circumambulates the metropolitan area in hallucinating and wild episodes, eventually arriving on the English cliffs of East Yorkshire where he comes face to face with one of Jonathan Swift’s immortal Struldbruggs. A satirical novel of otherworldly proportion and literary brilliance, Walking to Hollywood is a fantastical and unforgettable trip through the unreality of our culture.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity

What if there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to? What if a mysterious tribe in the Amazon rainforest turn out to be the most boring people on the earth? What if the afterlife is nothing more than a London suburb, where the dead get new flats, new jobs, and their own telephone directory? These are the sort of truths that emerge in this collection of stories by one of England’s most gifted writers. In The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self tips over the banal surfaces of everyday existence to uncover the hideous, the hilarious, and the bizarre. Psychiatry, anthropology, theology and literature will never be the same.

Grey Area

Drawing on the banality and comic potential of modern life, this collection of short stories ‘brilliantly explores the fine line between sanity and insanity, hitting uncomfortably close to home’ USA Today.

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

The New York Times Book Review has called Will Self ‘a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis,’ and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a dazzling foray into his funhouse world. Status conscious New Yorkers navigate the perils of dating along with their very literal ‘inner children.’ A man is seduced into a misanthropically charged symbiosis with the insects infesting his cottage. In ‘The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz,’ a black Londoner discovers an enormous rock of crack cocaine underpinning his house and quickly turns it into an efficient little empire. In the title story a psychoanalyst strips away all the sang froid of his professionalism to find beneath…
precisely nothing. Sharp, funny, and packed with verbal fireworks, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys confirms yet again Will Self’s stature as one of the most accomplished and original writers of his generation.

Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

A new novella and four new short stories from Will Self his first since 1999’s Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, which see him return to the disturbing and ruckled terrain of his bestselling first collection. Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe is another warped window on the wibbly wobbly world of fear and fun that Self like some malevolent deity has fashioned over the years.

The Undivided Self

Since the release of his first story collection in 1991, Will Self has been hailed as a master of the short story. Now, for the first time, selected stories from his five highly praised collections will be available in one volume, introduced by Rick Moody. These stories, drawn from The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Gray Area, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, and Liver plus one story never before published give us unexpected comic twists, masterful language, and the ordinary colored by the absurd: a man who finds his mother walking in a London suburb ten months after her death; the odd nuances of a drab office worker’s daily routine; and a send up of the British elite that takes place after a carcinogenic fog blankets England. Compared favorably to Nabokov, Pynchon, Gaddis, Ballard, and DeLillo, Will Self is a bold satirist whose selected stories represent some of the best and most outrageous fiction of the last decade.

Liver

British satirist Will Self spins four interconnected stories into a brilliantly insightful commentary on human foibles and resilience. Will Self’s remarkable new stories center on the disease and decay that target the largest of human organs: the Liver. Set in locales as toxic as a London drinking club and mundane as a clinic in an ultraorderly Swiss city, the stories distill the hard lives of their subjects whether alcoholic, drug addict, or cancer patient. I n Fois Humane, set at the Plantation Club, it s always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter, and the shivering denizens of this dusty realm spend their days observing its proprietor as he force feeds the barman vodkaspiked beer. Joyce Beddoes, protagonist of Leberkn del, has terminal Liver cancer and is on her way to be euthanized in Zurich when, miraculously, her disease goes into remission. In Prometheus a young copywriter at London s most cutting edge ad agency has his Liver nibbled by a griffon thrice daily, but he s always in the pink the following morning and ready to make that killer pitch. If blood and bile flow through Liverish London, the two arteries meet in Birdy Num Num, where career junky Billy Chobham performs little services for the customers who gather to wait for the Man, while in his blood a virus pullulates. A moving portrayal of egos, appetites and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary achievement.

RED

A gorgeous new Cecelia mini book which contains two powerful and unforgettable short stories. Girl in the Mirror Lila knows how lucky she is to have found the man of her dreams. But when a secret from her family’s past comes to light on her wedding day, her destiny changes in the most unexpected of ways! The Memory Maker They say you never forget your first love. But what happens when those cherished memories start to fade? Some people would do anything to hold on to the past and, for one heartbroken man, that means finding a way to relive those precious moments!

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis

A brief and brilliant satire of magazine hacks and fashionistas, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis shows Will Self a writer acclaimed as ‘a masterly prose maker’ by London’s Sunday Times at the top of his form. It looks as if it’s going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded as trapped in the bosom of the most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts: he’s losing his heart to Ursula Bentley, a nubile and vacuous magazine columnist; he’s in danger of losing his job at the pretentious listings magazine Rendezvous; he’s losing his mind courtesy of Colombia’s chief illegal export; and, worst of all, he’s losing his soul…
to Bell. Bell is a newspaper columnist, radio host, television personality but more than that, he is the kingpin guiding the ship of media scandal through the lower depths. From his headquarters in the Sealink Club he pulls the strings that control the disseminators of drek and gatherers of glib. And he has had Ursula Bentley and just about everyone else, female and male. As Richard pursues the Jicki perfume wafting from Ursula, he is in fact being drawn into a much more sinister web. Murky, paranoid, and hilarious, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis is Will Self at his best.

A Report to the Minister

A brief and brilliant satire of magazine hacks and fashionistas, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis shows Will Self a writer acclaimed as ‘a masterly prose maker’ by London’s Sunday Times at the top of his form. It looks as if it’s going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded as trapped in the bosom of the most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts: he’s losing his heart to Ursula Bentley, a nubile and vacuous magazine columnist; he’s in danger of losing his job at the pretentious listings magazine Rendezvous; he’s losing his mind courtesy of Colombia’s chief illegal export; and, worst of all, he’s losing his soul…
to Bell. Bell is a newspaper columnist, radio host, television personality but more than that, he is the kingpin guiding the ship of media scandal through the lower depths. From his headquarters in the Sealink Club he pulls the strings that control the disseminators of drek and gatherers of glib. And he has had Ursula Bentley and just about everyone else, female and male. As Richard pursues the Jicki perfume wafting from Ursula, he is in fact being drawn into a much more sinister web. Murky, paranoid, and hilarious, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis is Will Self at his best.

Junk Mail

Will Self is one of the most important British novelists of his generation, and he is as acclaimed in the UK for his outstanding, daring journalism as he is for his fiction. Now finally available in America, Junk Mail is an original selection of pieces from Self’s nonfiction and journalism that will introduce American readers to Self as a literary journalist par excellence. Animated by the scathing brilliance and unflinching determination to walk the road less traveled, Junk Mail is an often irreverent trawl through a landscape of drugs, culture, art, literature, and current events topics Self illuminates with a keen and entirely original eye. We follow Self into the operation of an upstanding crack dealer, behind the myth of the ‘pragmatist’ approach to drug legalization on the streets of Amsterdam, and to lunch with Indian author Salman Rushdie. Whether he is writing about bad boy British artist Damien Hirst, how literary renegade William Burroughs has changed our outlook on art and intoxication, or what the current state of transsexuality has to say about gender for all of us, this is a lively and necessary anthology from one of the defining voices of our times.

Nicola Hicks

Will Self is one of the most important British novelists of his generation, and he is as acclaimed in the UK for his outstanding, daring journalism as he is for his fiction. Now finally available in America, Junk Mail is an original selection of pieces from Self’s nonfiction and journalism that will introduce American readers to Self as a literary journalist par excellence. Animated by the scathing brilliance and unflinching determination to walk the road less traveled, Junk Mail is an often irreverent trawl through a landscape of drugs, culture, art, literature, and current events topics Self illuminates with a keen and entirely original eye. We follow Self into the operation of an upstanding crack dealer, behind the myth of the ‘pragmatist’ approach to drug legalization on the streets of Amsterdam, and to lunch with Indian author Salman Rushdie. Whether he is writing about bad boy British artist Damien Hirst, how literary renegade William Burroughs has changed our outlook on art and intoxication, or what the current state of transsexuality has to say about gender for all of us, this is a lively and necessary anthology from one of the defining voices of our times.

The Idler 25

The Idler team believe that idleness is unjustly criticised in modern society when it is, in fact, a vital component of a happy life. In this new edition of The Idler, the team examines the way money and greed have taken over our lives and looks at ways of escaping its clutches. In Medieval times, prioritising money making was seen as a sin. On their deathbed, usurers tried to pay back the money they had extorted so they would have a better chance of getting into heaven. Money was just a part of life, a means of exchange, rather than an end in itself. Then came the Protestant work ethic, which introduced the damaging notion that ‘time is money.’ The Idler wants to reintroduce a fun loving medieval attitude to life.

Sore Sites

A selection of the author’s iconoclastic weekly columns in Building Design is now made available, decorated with the author’s own extremely bad drawings, to those without access to the benefits of the architectural trade press. Alighting on subjects broadly architectural, Self talks you through a trip on an open top bus in London, a visit to Barratt Homes and marvels over the ugliness of Cologne. His targets and objects of affection are as diverse as Pictish broughs; the SIPSocracy and autogeddon; the dignity, or otherwise, of labor; and Norman Foster’s plane. Will Self takes this opportunity to scratch at the sore places and follies of modern life the Millennium Dome, the Diana cult, Berlin, the new Getty Center, the Cotswolds; to promote his heroes J G Ballard, Thomas De Quincey, Julian Jaynes; and to share his observations on topics ranging from Eric Gill’s dress sense and exotic sexual practices to his own experiences as a hod carrier.

Feeding Frenzy

‘Feeding Frenzy‘, Will Self’s third collection of journalism and selected writings takes us through the turbulent years 1995 2000. During this period Self surfed the great wave of olive oil which nearly swept British metropolitan culture away, and produced a series of restaurant reviews for ‘The Observer’, whose coruscating criticality led to a cabal of restaurateurs plotting his contract killing. In essays to accompany the work of admired artists such as Marc Quinn, feature articles on rock music and remote places, reviews of cultural phenomena as diverse as voyeuristic television and the Queen Mother, Self has produced what can only be described as a cachinnating cacophony of willful provocation.

Psychogeography

For those interested in the connection between people and place, the best of the decade long collaboration between literary brat packer Will Self and gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman. Opening with a dazzling new 20,000 word essay on walking from London to New York, Psychogeography is a collection of 50 short pieces written over the last four years, together with 50 four color illustrations by Ralph Steadman. In Psychogeography Self and Steadman explore the relationship between psyche and place in the contemporary world. Self thinks most people have a ‘wind screen based virtuality’ on long and short distance travel. We drive, take buses and trains, fly. To combat this compromised reality, Will Self walks, relating intimately to place, as pedestrians do. Ranging in subject from swimming the Ganges to motorcycling across the Australian outback, shopping in an Iowa mall to surfing a tsunami, Psychogeography is at once a map of our world and the psychoanalysis of the way we inhabit it. The pieces are serious, humorous, facetious, and rambunctious. Psychogeography, the study of the effects of geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals, has captivated other writers including W. G. Sebald and Peter Ackroyd, but Self and Steadman have their own unique spin on how place shapes people and vice versa.

Psycho Too

Building on their first successful collaboration, more Self and Steadman on the oddities of place in the contemporary world. Will Self’s satiric eye and hyperactive prose meet once again with Ralph Steadman s manic hand and effulgent color, creating the coveted sequel to their collaboration Psychogeography: here is Psycho Too. In this energetic romp through an all new landscape, Self and Steadman further explore the effects of our geographical environment natural, man made, or man manipulated on our emotions and behavior, and the interplay of surroundings and self. In the introductory essay, Self sets out to walk the entire length of Britain or, more precisely, a Britainshaped island off the coast of Dubai, part of the artificial archipelago of private isles replicating, in miniature, all the world s landmas*ses. Fifty additional short essays cover terrain from Istanbul to Los Angeles, East Yorkshire to Easter Island, all accompanied by Steadman s inimitable illustrations. Psycho Too is a dazzling guide to the wheres and wherefores of the way we live now.

George Condo: Mental States

Painter and sculptor George Condo born 1957 has inhabited a broad swath of cultural contexts over his three decade career, from the early 1980s East Village scene to a collaboration with William Burroughs to making album cover art for Phish and, most recently, Kanye West. Early in his career, Condo was friendly with Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and briefly worked at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Having been included in the Whitney Biennial in 1987, by 2010 he was once again judged so original that a bronze sculpture of his was placed in that year’s Biennial. Condo’s loose, imaginative approach to portraiture has distinguished him throughout the decades: ‘There was a time when I realized that the central focal point of portraiture did not have to be representational in any way,’ he said in 1992. ‘You don’t need to paint the body to show the truth about a character. All you need is the head and the hands.’ George Condo: Mental States surveys the artist’s career from 1982 to the present day, focusing on his portrait paintings but also including a selection of sculptural busts made in materials such as gold and bronze. Organized by theme, and including 100 images of artworks in addition to writings by Will Self, David Means, Ralph Rugoff and Laura Hoptman, this volume explores Condo’s relationship to art history, popular culture and contemporary society.