Geïllustreerde novelle van Brits societyfiguur Will Self, en meteen ook het eerste dat ik van hem las. Door de verwijzing naar 50s classic The Sweet Smell Of Success meteen al een mediasatire, maar dan van de vunzige soort. Richard Hermes is een van de vele pseudo-journalisten die in een smerig, ...
Soooo when I’m reading a book, I’ll sit with a flashcard and write down all the new words/words I didn’t know had different forms/ words it would not occur to me to write, and then I upload the words to Anki so that I can test myself on them and hopefully memorise them. I’ve been doing this for a...
Who says short story collections have to be 30% filler? Will Self hits eight consecutive balls out of the proverbial park with his third collection of short fiction, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys. Whether writing a story about two drug-dealing brothers who find a stratum of crack beneat...
Note: This review was written on Aug 19th 2007 when the writer was a doe-eyed yoof of twenty.Were2guv? The Island of Ham?The latest doorstopper from the Prometheus of contemporary storytelling Will Self is a work of catatonic, lucid and breathtaking speculative fiction, alternating between a post...
Some thoughts on Will Self’s How The Dead Live. The first 280 or so pages deliver the constant narrative pleasure of some illicit drug. One is constantly buoyed along by the wonderful storytelling.American Lily Bloom, twice-married, now a widow living in London, is dying of cancer--and then stone...
Will self is an interesting personality in the literary world. Across the internet there seems to be an abundance of people who either find him annoying, obnoxious or overly self-indulgent. On the other hand there are some people dotted around on Goodreads and other literary forums who seem to th...
Cock and Bull is two independent stories back to back; connected through their core theme of an person who develops secondary genitalia, of the opposite gender. I didn't read them back to back – instead I read the first story, Cock, during a slow period in a non-fiction book on English grammar an...
I 1st read mention of Will Self in a text by Stewart Home. Home insulted Self as being something along the lines of a rich Oxford junkie who doesn't deserve his reputation as an underground writer. Since I'd never heard of Self before, he had no reputation w/ me at all. Knowing Stewart's tende...
Self's title here works two ways. His Dorian is an imitation of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Self's Dorian Gray, which is to say his hero, is an imitation of whatever he needs to be, given the situation at hand. Numerous times the narrator refers to this man as a chameleon, and indeed the...
This second collection of stories is a technical improvement over its predecessor, Self's debut The Quantum Theory of Insanity. Here the stories develop at a much faster pace and because of such are often shorter than the aforementioned earlier stories. The second half of this book is stronger th...
One of contemporary fiction’s most “wickedly brilliant…endlessly talented” (Publishers Weekly) satirists delivers a dystopian novel skewering global politics and Big Brother-style government post-9/11.When Tom Brodzinksi tries to give up smoking, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that t...
She led him away so it was just the two of them, all snugglewise and cuddleup. The other mummies thought this strange – and said so – but Effi was their knee woman and a rapper like her mummy Sharun before her. Drivers came and went while the knee woman remained, a power to be reckoned with on th...
Unlike me, he wore a bum-freezer and a fez and was holding a child of around five in the crook of his arm. But, there again, like me, both figures had faces the colour of pipe clay and eyes like pee holes in the snow. I had walked to the Shrine Auditorium for obvious reasons: if, as I believed, b...
It was only 7 a.m., yet Vance’s office workers were already hurrying through the rain-soaked streets. The Central Criminal Court stood on Dundas Boulevard. It was an ugly lump of a building five storeys high. The concrete façade was textured so as to resemble the intricate...
‘Gor…’ he exclaimed to a sunfilled kitchen, ‘I really tied one on last night.’ There was no one to answer. Beverley and Derek had gone and Gary had never returned. Dan found Carol upstairs, watching TV-AM in bed. He cursed, seeing how the hands stood on the little clock in the corner of the scree...
This sally Albert does not hear, it is not until – I say, De’Ath, if we don’t look lively we’ll get caught behind that four – which comes together with an unprecedented hand on his shoulder, that he grasps these two syllables apply to him personally, as much as legally. Mayhew, lopsided by his fu...
The man they were watching was plump, in his late thirties and wearing a mid-price trench coat. His thin, brown hair wasn't making it all the way over his pate. The two watchers could see this distinctly, because they were four flights up and looking more or less straight down. ‘I don't think he'...