Will Self's Blog, page 31

More reviews of Shark pt II

The Financial Times: “… an intoxicating experience. Self’s powerful command of language animates the intense prose while his dry wit is given a freer rein than in Umbrella. Shark drives remorselessly on; it takes us with it.”

The Mail on Sunday: “Self is on a mission to revive modernist fiction and newcomers will find the text, excised of paragraphs and most punctuation, tough at first. But it is unmatched for vibrancy and sensation, and befits the novel’s raw, disturbing subjects – the trauma...

Real meals: The Duck & Waffle

How many times do you have to tread in vomit before it puts you off your dinner? This wasn’t, in my case and that of my companions, an academic question: as we walked from my son’s flat in Haggerston, east London, towards the City, we must have passed puddles of sick running into double figures – in some parts of Shoreditch the puke lay so extensively on the pavement that the chunks of food glistering in its bile seemed like some duodenal wrack, left behind when the Great Vomit Wave of ’14 fi...

Archway With Words event

Buy tickets to see Will Self at Archway With Words on Tuesday 14 October at 7.30pm, Archway Methodist Church, Archway Close N19 3TD, wegottickets.com/event/289436. For more details, go to archwaywithwords.com.

Shark reading in Paris

Free Thinking: Language

Listen to Will Self and the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker talking to Matthew Sweet on Free Thinking on Radio 3 here.

On location: From Stockwell to Warlingham

London, Friday 20 June 2014 – it was the evening just before the shortest night of the year, so what could have been more fitting than to walk the 16 or so miles from my house in Stockwell to the high point of the North Downs near Woldingham? I wanted this view at dawn – I wanted to see the city with the startled provincial eyes of a waking Wordsworth, rather than from the gritty perspective of a cockney wordsmith; but I also wanted the experience of getting there: the sole-shuffle over tarma...

Shark in New Zealand

You can listen to Will Self talking about his new novel, Shark, on Radio New Zealand here. The interview is about half an hour long.

You can buy Shark in NZ at Page & Blackmore here for $37.

Listed Londoner on BBC London

Hear Will Self talking to Robert Elms about his favourite things in London here for six days.

The madness of crowds: Hipsters, aka dickheads

July 2014: it’s breakfast time at the Farmer’s Daughter, a boutique motel in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. The decor is suggestive of some deconstructed Midwestern idyll, what with old farming implements nailed up against one exterior wall, yards of gingham hanging from assorted rails and plenty of rough-hewn yet varnished wood. The establishment is constructed around an exterior courtyard, and as I take my seat, intent on caffeine and carbohydrates, the soft, fume-tangy morning air is...

London beneath our feet

‘One summer when I was growing up in the north London suburbs I dug a deep hole in the back garden. I was always digging holes, but this one was different — it grew deeper and deeper; I chopped through roots with the spade’s blade, I clawed out stones, old bricks and lumps of concrete with my bare hands. The rest of the family began to be vaguely impressed — my mother came and took a snapshot of me lying full-length in the bottom of my hole, listening to the big hit of that year (1974), on my...