Bøger af Will Self

The ultimate death compendium, featuring the world's most extraordinary artistic and ethnographic objects concerned with mortality, together with text by expert contributors.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2012For half a century Audrey Death has been in a state of semi-consciousness. Severed from the world of the living after falling victim to Encephalitis lethargica, she has languished in Friern Barnet Mental Hospital. Then, in 1971, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner arrives.Audrey's experiences of a bygone Edwardian London: her socialist lover, her involvement with the Suffragists, and her work in a munitions factory during the First World War, alternate with Dr Busner's attempts to bring her back to life with a new and powerful drug. His investigations lead to revelations that are both shocking and tragic, and which will return to haunt him decades later.

Shark by Will Self - the eagerly anticipated new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella4 May 1970. A week earlier President Nixon has ordered American ground forces into Cambodia to pursue the Vietcong. By the end of the day four students will be lying in the grounds of Kent State University, shot dead by the National Guard. On the other side of the Atlantic, it's a brilliant sunny morning after an April of heavy rain, and at the Concept House therapeutic community he has set up in the London suburb of Willesden, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner has been tricked into joining a decidedly ill-advised LSD trip with several of its disturbed residents.Five years later, sitting in a nearby cinema watching Steven Spielberg's Jaws with his young son, Busner realizes the true nature of the events that transpired on that dread-soaked day, when a survivor of the worst disaster in the US Navy's history - the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in the shark-infested south Pacific - came face-to-face with the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gay's mission to Hiroshima. Set a year before the action of his Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, Will Self's new novel continues its exploration of the complex relationship between human psychopathology and human technological progress; and like Umbrella, weaves together multiple narratives across several decades of the twentieth century to produce a fiendish tapestry depicting the state we're enmeshed in.Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. He lives in South London.

The Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella writes his most American novel yet--a brilliant portrait of a 1950s housewife, based on the life of the author's mother, and an exploration of sexual freedom and sublimated desire, set between the dining halls of Cornell University and the raucous parties of midcentury New York CityWill Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed "the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation" by The Guardian. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that put her first marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril. Based on the intimate diaries Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm: a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a world-girdling collection of writings inspired by a life lived in and for literatureFrom one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” by the Guardian, Will Self’s Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback, and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell, and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald’s childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs’s Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readers, how, what, and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self’s trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humor infuse every piece.A book that examines how the human stream of consciousness flows into and out of literature, Why Read will satisfy both old and new readers of this icon of contemporary literature.

The author presents a "smart, beguiling and occasionally stomach-turning" collection of linked stories (New York Times Book Review).

"From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a world-girdling collection of writings inspired by a life lived in and for literature. From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed "the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation" by The Guardian, Will Self's Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature. Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback, and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell, and Conrad. He writes movingly on W. G. Sebald's childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs's Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readers how, what, and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self's trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humor infuse every piece. A book that examines how the human stream of consciousness flows into and out of literature, Why Read will satisfy both old and new readers of this icon of contemporary literature"--]cProvided by publisher.

One of contemporary fiction's most talented satirists delivers a dystopian novel skewering global politics and Big Brother-style government post-9/11.

What is there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because "somebody" has to? What if a mysterious tribe in the Amazon rainforest turn out to be the most boring people on earth? What if the afterlife is nothing more than a London suburb, where the dead get new flats, new jobs, and their own telephone directory? These are the sort of truths that emerge in this collection of stories by one of England's most gifted writers. In "The Quantity Theory of Insanity," Will Self tips over the banal surfaces of everyday existence to uncover the hideous, the hilarious, and the bizarre. Psychiatry, anthropology, theology--and literature--will never be the same.

One of the most remarkably inventive voices of his generation, author Will Self delivers a stunning work of fiction. In "Walking to Hollywood," a British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through L.A. freeways and eroding English cliffs, skewering celebrity as he attempts to solve a crime: who killed the movies. When Will reconnects with his childhood friend, the world suddenly seems disproportionate. Sherman Oaks--scarcely three feet tall at forty-five--and his ironically-sized sculptures--replicas of his body varying from the gargantuan to the miniscule--spark in Will a flurry of obsessive-compulsive thoughts and a nagging desire to experience the world by foot. Ignoring his therapist and nemesis Zack Busner, Self travels to Hollywood on a mission to discover who--or what--killed the movies. Convinced that everyone from his agent, friends, and bums on the street are portrayed by famous actors, Self goes undercover into the dangerous world of celebrity culture. He circumambulates the metropolitan area in hallucinating and wild episodes, eventually arriving on the English cliffs of East Yorkshire where he comes face to face with one of Jonathan Swift's immortal Struldbruggs.

'Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers.' New YorkFrom one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed 'the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation' by the Guardian, Will Self's Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald's childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs's Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readers how, what and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self's trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humour infuse every piece.

How to capture that breadth in one work of art? How to celebrate a single system while also reflecting the millions of lives that it transports every day? This book explores the historic and mythological significance of the labyrinth.

A collection of essays and other texts by eleven internationally acclaimed writers, critics and artists. Over a decade after his death W.G. Sebald remains a major presence in world literature. He has a devoted readership in many different countries. This lively and accessible collection offers a series of different illuminations on why SebaldâEUR(TM)s work continues to fascinate. Follow Ali Smith as she gets loosed in the translation of his work. Discover with Robert Macfarlane the arguments for and against SebaldâEUR(TM)s reputation. Find out from Will Self why British readers might find him a "good German". Think with John Coetzee about the recurrent psychological crisis that haunts SebaldâEUR(TM)s imagination. These are just a few of the many discoveries, insights, and imaginative responses that this collection offers its readers. This is the book that readers of Sebald, new or old, need to take with them as they journey through his work. It speaks of and to the different experiences involved in reading Sebald, whether responding to the relation between word and image, or the question of what can and cannot be remembered, or the resonant character of voice and voices, or the strange networks and connections that make up SebaldâEUR(TM)s texts. And then there are personal memories by Tess Jaray of working with Sebald, Tacita Dean's own version of Sebaldian connectedness and an enigmatic memorial by Richard Long. The book is edited and has an introduction by Jon Cook, a Professor of Literature and Director of the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia, who was for a number of years a friend and colleague of W.G. Sebald.