Will Self's Blog, page 32

More reviews of Shark

Mark Lawson in the News Statesman: “In an era when publishers and reading groups exert so much pressure towards the soft read, Self … is saving the life of the hard read that rewards the attention demanded.” Review here.

Sam Leith in the Observer: “Self shares JG Ballard’s interest in the psychopathology of everyday life, and in the insistent strange juxtapositions between apparently discrete things. But where Ballard most often works at the level of symbol and image, and is almost militantly...

What we’d miss about Scotland

‘Try visualising the Union Jack without the Saltire, which is just a fancy way of saying imagine the British flag without its Scottish component. It looks pretty weird: just a bunch of red lines radiating across a white field like a burst blood vessel. But if, by some caprice of the old gods, the Scots vote on 18 September to leave the Union, that’s what the rest of us will have flying over us. If the metaphoric implications are disturbing enough, what about the symbolic ones? For that red-le...

Front Row

Listen to Will talking about Shark on Radio 4′s Front Row last night, here.

Shark uncaged

Will Self’s new novel, Shark, is published in the UK today by Penguin. The Daily Telegraph‘s five-star review hails it as “a truly wonderful novel … an exciting, mesmerising, wonderfully disturbing book. Go with it and it’ll suck you under”. The Guardian‘s review says that “Umbrella was about how humanity brilliantly innovates; Shark is about how it constantly devastates … I have every expectation that when this trilogy does conclude, it will be recognised as the most remorseless vivisection...

Will Self interviews … himself

At the Guardian website here via Penguin.

On Crossrail

‘Far be it from me to come over all Freudian, but there has to be latent significance in the manifestation of a group of men boring through the ground inside a giant, phallic-shaped machine with a woman’s name. And not just one group of men: we’re talking eight, for eight phallic-shaped machines, all of which bear women’s names.

‘True, to be fair to the Crossrail project, there are women working these big drilling dicks as well – the evening before I visited the Crossrail site in east London I...

A Point of View: George Orwell

Read why Will Self thinks Orwell is the Supreme Mediocrity here, or listen to it here.

The madness of crowds: Crowdfunding

Some guy in some 0.1-horse town in the ass-end of America’s great nowhere put up a crowdfunding appeal on the web: “I want to bake an apple pie for my mom but I don’t have the money to do it.” A couple of days later there was $49,000 in his bank account. I like to think he’ll now bake many, many apple pies and deliver them widely throughout the States to the needy – like some Johnny Apple-Pie-Seed, but in all probability he’ll just trouser the cash.

At least part of the appeal of crowdfunding...

Win A Signed Copy Of Shark

Goodreads.com are giving away 10 signed copies of Shark, Will’s new novel published next week. Visit the Goodreads.com site for more info – there’s only a couple of days left to enter the giveaway, which ends on August 29th.

A Point of View: What’s funny?

Listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View for Radio 4 here, or read it here.