From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a world-girdling collection of writings inspired by a life lived in and for literature.
The finest essays here are
incisive, perceptive and provocative. But they are also wildly entertaining.
Sharp, trenchant essays from an enfant terrible of modern letters...[there's] plenty to ponder in this
energetic, opinionated collectionWill Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers.
Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel.
Self often enough writes with such vividness it's as if he is the first person to see anything at all.
Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness.
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including
Great Apes,
The Book of Dave,
How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002,
The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, and
Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. He lives in south London.