Will Self's Blog, page 49

Tales of Winter on BBC4

Will Self is one of the contributors to Tales of Winter: The Art of Snow and Ice on BBC4 tomorrow night at 9pm, talking about Breugel’s Hunters in the Snow.

The Madness of Crowds: New Year’s Eve

These are the coldest collations of the year: shards of glass tossed on the kerbstone, dressed with vomit. Nearby stands a seven-eighths empty bottle of supermarket champagne; while if you follow the straggle of pink streamers you can see beer cans lurking by the wheelie bin, tinnily jostling. The party has well and truly pooped out.

Last year there was comparatively little hoo-ha: the failure of the Mayan prophecies to come up to scratch left the credulous with sod all in the way of an apocal...

A Point of View: Staring at the Shard

Will Self’s latest A Point of View for Radio 4 (where the Guardian reports that he is about to be named as the station’s firstwriter in residence) focuseson urban planning and can be read here, or heard here.

More Umbrella press

Here’s an interview with Will Self in the National Post of Canada, and another one for the Daily Beast.

Also, there’s a review of Umbrella at the NPR, which hails it as a “modernist masterpiece”, and an interview with Will here (which includes a reading from Umbrella by Will), and also a review in the Washington Post too.

Live video chat

Will Self is going to conduct a live video chat with the LA Times today at 10am Pacific (6pm GMT) about his new novel, Umbrella, and many other things besides.

Umbrella – An introduction and ‘The Rules’

For US readers of Umbrella, here’s Will on how he researched his latest novel, which is a good introduction:

“Whenever I reach the end of a novel – and I mean the very end, when the second set of proofs have been corrected, and the button at the printers, for good or ill, has been pushed – I find myself plagued by a very particular and almost hallucinatory condition that I’ve dubbed – with exactitude if not felicity – ‘everythingitis’. The distinguishing feature of everythingitis – which it sh...

Umbrella US reviews

Grove has just published Umbrella in the States, and early reviews have been as effusive as they were in the UK last year.

The Boston Globe: “The result is page after page of gorgeously musical prose. Self’s sentences bounce and weave, and like poetry, they refract. The result is mesmerizing.”

For the full review, go here.

The Economist: “An entertaining and enthralling book … [Self] has managed to write an experimental novel that is also a compassionate and thrilling book—and one that, despite...

On Umbrella’s US publication

This will be the first major publication of one of my books in the US that I haven’t crossed the pond for – and so salutations to my American readers; I write to you from my London fastness, tucked up snugly at the top of my 1848 house in sarf London, looking across the rooftops to where Renzo Piano’s Shard upthrusts, a teasing Ala recherche de priapisme perdu. I have mixed feelings about not making it over – I am, of course, a demi-American on the maternal side, and hold a US passport, so th...

A Point of View: American Ambivalence

Listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View, on American Ambivalence, here, or read the transcript here.

Real meals: The Spaghetti House

I thought it might be a good idea to depart this year with an explosive fart rather than a whimpering burp, so I arranged to meet a young radical friend of mine at the Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge. The Spaghetti House chain seems on the surface to be an inconsequential thing: there are 12 coiling across London, dishing up pasta, pizza and the trimmings in an ambience of dark wood and off-white Artex – so far, so dull.

Indeed, after recent outings to Prezzo and Zizzi – both larger operation...