Will Self's Blog, page 52

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

Read Will Self’s review of Oliver Sacks’s new book, Hallucinations, at Guardian Review here.

Real meals: America Deserta

In John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel,The Grapes of Wrath,the Joad family, forced off their farm by the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, head west to the promised land of California. Impoverished and immiserated, three generations of them pile on top of a chimerical vehicle they’ve welded together out of a wrecked truck bed and a jalopy. Unsurprisingly, in a novel that concerns itself with the material realities of life, Steinbeck places appropriate emphasis on the cooking and sharing of food – his acc...

The Great Automatic Grammatizator

Listen to a sample of Will Self reading the Roald Dahl short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” here, from a new audio collection of Dahl’s stories, Someone Like You, published by Penguin, which also includes readings by Stephen Mangan, Richard Griffiths, Richard E Grant, Tamsin Greig and many others.

The Whiteness of the Whale

Listen to Will Self reading chapter 42 of Moby Dick, The Whiteness of the Whale, as part of the Moby Dick Big Read.

Constellation of Genius review

To read Will Self’s review of Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One – which he says is “an insanely readable book about modernism” that is “the primer the subject has been looking for: a way into its symbolic labyrinth” – go to the Guardian website here.

The madness of crowds: David Icke

It must have been a hippy-dippy-happy-hoppy fortnight round the David Icke household, what with Jimmy Savile being exposed as a paedophile. The Savile business has all the hallmarks of one of those “Who knew?!” moments (this to be exclaimed mockingly in the manner of Jeff Greene, Larry David’s roly-poly agent in Curb Your Enthusiasm). I mean to say: children’s TV presenter and confirmed bachelor who reveres his mummy and feels most comfy in loose-fitting sportive nylon turns out to be a kiddy...

Umbrella audio book

To buy an unabridged audio book version of Umbrella, by Whole Story Audiobooks, which has also produced audio versions of The Butt, Liver(read by Will),The Book of Dave(also read by Will)and How the Dead Live, go to Amazon here.

Will’s own readings ofDorian(Penguin) and Revelation(Canongate) are also available on audio.

Man Booker (photobomb) winner …

According to the Independent, Will Self was the winner of the “best photobomb in the history of the Bookers” with this picture.

Today interview

Listen to Will Self talking on the Today programme on the day of the Man Booker prize announcement, which will be at around 9.40pm tonight. There’s also a news story on the BBC about Will and Hilary Mantel being joint favourites for the prize.

Real meals: WAGfree

The last thing you want to hear about is my bowels – I know that. In William Burroughs’s emetic classic, Naked Lunch, he has a riff wherein rampant bores escape from an asylum equipped with blowpipes and curare-tipped darts; these excolonial British civil servants paralyse their victims before subjecting them to tedious disquisitions on their own constipation – monologues that, Burroughs tells us, are “as intractable as the processes they describe”. So, none of that.

In fairness to me, having...