Books by Will Self
Moonlight Travellers
Bringing together two formidable talents for the first time, this literary and artistic collaboration on the theme of night travel features original artwork by Quentin Blake and text by Will Self.
This breakthrough publication promises both to excite and haunt the reader’s imagination. Quentin Blake, the so-called Godfather of Illustration, combines his talents with novelist Will Self, “one of the most manically imaginative writers at work today” (Financial Times). The result is a book of irresistible appeal to literature and art lovers alike.
Blake’s watercolors relate, with dark, fantastical humor, the experience of journeying across unknown landscapes in the dead of night. Accompanying this artistic narrative is an equally evocative text from the ever-brilliant mind of Will Self. With characteristic sharpness and wit, Self melds fact, fiction, and memory to transport the reader in the most radical way, departing on unexpected trajectories in response to Blake’s visual romp through time and space. Together, word and image connect with our deepest sensibilities in Moonlight Travellers as we journey through the landscapes and dreamscapes of night. 40 illustrations
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Umbrella
by Will Self, Elena Arevalo Melville
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.”James Joyce, Ulysses
1918
Audrey Deathfeminist, socialist and munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenalfalls ill with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic rages across Europe, killing a third of its victims and condemning a further third to living death.
1971
Under the curious eyes of psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, assumed mental patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a spring grotto that she has made every one of the forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental Hospital.
2010
Now retired, Dr. Busner travels waywardly across North London in search of the truth about that tumultuous summer when he awoke the post-encephalitic patients under his care using a new and powerful drug.
Weaving together a dense tapestry of consciousness and lived life across an entire century, in his latest and most ambitious novel, Will Self takes up the challenge of Modernism and reveals how itand it alonecan unravel new and unsettling truths about our world and how it came to be.
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Umbrella
by Will Self, Elena Arevalo Melville
"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."James Joyce, Ulysses
Radical and uncompromising, Umbrella is a tour de force from one of England’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, and Self’s most ambitious novel to date. Moving between Edwardian London and a suburban mental hospital in 1971, Umbrella exposes the twentieth century’s technological searchlight as refracted through the dark glass of a long term mental institution. While making his first tours of the hospital at which he has just begun working, maverick psychiatrist Zachary Busner notices that many of the patients exhibit a strange physical tic: rapid, precise movements that they repeat over and over. One of these patients is Audrey Dearth, an elderly woman born in the slums of West London in 1890. Audrey’s memories of a bygone Edwardian London, her lovers, involvement with early feminist and socialist movements, and, in particular, her time working in an umbrella shop, alternate with Busner’s attempts to treat her condition and bring light to her clouded world. Busner’s investigations into Audrey’s illness lead to discoveries about her family that are shocking and tragic.
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Umbrella
by Will Self, Elena Arevalo Melville
Clara finds an umbrella on the ground at the park and does a good deed by putting it on a bench. The umbrella says "thank you" and invites Clara to make a wish.
So unfolds a magical chain of events featuring a new friend, an elephant, musical butterflies, and a naughty fox who learns his lesson. The artwork in this quirky piece of magical realism is packed with humor and character, and the surprising ending is both heart-warming and uplifting.
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Shark
by Will Self
May 4th, 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 shot dead by the National Guards in the grounds of Kent State University. 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, 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 - came face-to-face with the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gay's mission to bomb Hiroshima.
Set a year before the action of his Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, Will Self's new novel Shark continues its exploration of the complex relationship between human psychopathology and human technological progress.
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Shark
by Will Self
May 4th, 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 shot dead by the National Guards in the grounds of Kent State University. 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, 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 - came face-to-face with the British Royal Air Force observer on the Enola Gay's mission to bomb Hiroshima.
Set a year before the action of his Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, Will Self's new novel Shark continues its exploration of the complex relationship between human psychopathology and human technological progress.
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Phone
by Will Self
Published to rave reviews in the United Kingdom, Phone tells the story of two men: Zack Busner and Jonathan De’Ath. Busner is a psychiatrist who has made his name through his unorthodox treatment of psychological damage, such as giving the controversial drug L-DOPA to patients ravaged by encephalitis, or administering LSD to World War II PTSD-sufferers. But now Busner’s own mind is fraying: Alzheimer’s is shredding his memory and his newest possession is a shiny smartphone given to him by his introverted grandson Ben. Meanwhile, Jonathan De’Ath, aka “the Butcher,” is an MI6 man who remains a mystery even to those closest to him, be it his washed-up old university lecturer father, his jumbling-bumbling mother, his hippy-dippy brothers, his spooky colleagues or multitudinous lovers. All of De’Ath’s acquaintances apply the “Butcher” epithet to him, and perhaps there is only one person who thinks of him with tenderness, a man he keeps top secret, encrypted in the databanks of his steely mind: Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, highly-trained tank commander, and Jonathan De’Ath’s long-time lover. As Busner’s mind totters and Jonathan and Gawain’s affair teeters, they come to face the interconnectedness of all lives, online and off, while an irritating phone continues to ring… ring… ring…
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Phone
by Will Self
The final volume in a trilogy beginning with Umbrella and followed by Shark, Phone tells the story of two men: Zack Busner and Jonathan De’Ath. Busner is a psychiatrist who has made his name through his unorthodox treatment of psychological damage, such as administering LSD to World War II PTSD-sufferers. But now Busner’s own mind is fraying: Alzheimer’s is shredding his memory and his newest possession is a shiny smartphone given to him by his autistic grandson Ben. Meanwhile, Jonathan De’Ath, aka “the Butcher,” is an MI6 man who remains a mystery even to those closest to him. Perhaps there is only one person who thinks of him with tenderness, a man he keeps top secret, encrypted in the databanks of his steely mind: Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, highly trained tank commander, and Jonathan De’Ath’s long-time lover. As Busner’s mind totters and Jonathan and Gawain’s affair teeters, they come to face the interconnectedness of all lives, online and off, while an irritating phone continues to ring. . . . ring. . . . ring. . . .
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Will: A Memoir
by Will Self
Unflinching, intoxicating, heartfelt, and propelled by an exceptional energy, Will is the long-awaited memoir by Will Self, whose works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into over twenty languages. A portrait of the artist as a young addict, Will is one of the most eloquent and unusual depictions of the allure of hard drugs ever written.
Will spins the reader from Self’s childhood in a quiet North London suburb to his mind-expanding education at Oxford, to a Burroughsian trip to Morocco, an outback vision in Australia, and, finally, a surreal turn in rehab. Echoing the great Modernist writers of the early twentieth century in its psychedelic stream of consciousness, Will is vividly imagistic and mordantly witty. It is both kunstlerroman and confessional, a tale of excess and degradation, a karmic cycle that leads back to the author’s own lack of . . . will.
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Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall
by Will Self
With lush, scrupulously exact prose [that] can vault from the poignant to the grotesque to the ridiculous with vertiginous ease” (The New York Times), author Will Self has established himself as one of the most remarkably inventive voices of his generation. In Walking to Hollywood, he leaps beyond reality into worlds inhabited by an array of charactersbig and small, human and delusionas he transverses LA freeways, eroding cliffs and Canadian fields, his disintegrating mind a constant companion.
In a series of quests exploring his obsessions, Self first reconnects with his childhood friend Sherman Oaks, a man scarcely three-feet-tall. Thirty-five years after parting ways, Sherman has gained attention in the art world for his sculptures: replicas of his body in various proportions, some as tall as buildings and others tiny as a fingernail. With Will’s obsessive-compulsive collection of items and Sherman’s biting temper, they make an oddly endearing and increasingly bizarre pair as they walk in spurts through Canada, New York, and the west coast of the United States. Returning home briefly, Self entangles himself in a mystery and departs for Los Angeles to discover who murdered the movies. Convinced everyone he meets is played by a famous actor, he goes undercover into the dangerous world of celebrity with hilarious consequences. Eventually leaving the deceptive lights of Hollywood, he arrives in Spurn Head, a town on the English shore. When his memory starts to slip away, Self follows clues and notes left behind at more lucid moments leading him through encounters with a madman, a game of checkers with Death, and a meeting with one of Swift’s immortal Struldbruggs.
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Great Apes (Will Self)
by Will Self
Like Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Great Apes is a strange and twisted tale, a surreal satire on the human condition, and an omen for those who wander too far. After a long night of partying, Simon Dykes, a successful British painter, wakes up to find that his girlfriend has turned into a chimpanzee. In fact, the world Simon once knew has become a planet of apes. Convinced he is still human, Simon is confined to the emergency ward of a hospital and put under the care of Dr. Zack Busner, clinical psychologist, radical psychoanalyst, maverick drug researcher, and media personality. Written with the glittering satiric edge that is Self's hallmark, Great Apes is a hilarious, disturbing, and truly unforgettable novel.
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Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self)
by Will Self
The New York Times Book Review has called Will Self "a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis," and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a dazzling foray into his funhouse world. Status-conscious New Yorkers navigate the perils of dating along with their very literal "inner children." A man is seduced into a misanthropically charged symbiosis with the insects infesting his cottage. In "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz," a black Londoner discovers an enormous rock of crack cocaine underpinning his house--and quickly turns it into an efficient little empire. In the title story a psychoanalyst strips away all the sang froid of his professionalism to find beneath ... precisely nothing. Sharp, funny, and packed with verbal fireworks, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys confirms yet again Will Self's stature as one of the most accomplished and original writers of his generation.
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My Idea of Fun: A Novel
by Will Self
Will Self has established himself as one of the most brilliant, daring, and inventive writers of his generation. My Idea of Fun is Will Self’s highly acclaimed first novel. The story of a devilishly clever international financier/marketing wizard and his young apprentice, My Idea of Fun is both a frighteningly dark subterranean exploration of capitalism run rampant and a wickedly sharp, technically acute display of linguistic pyrotechnics that glows with pure white-hot brilliance. Ian Wharton is a very ordinary young man until he is taken under the wing of a gentleman known variously as Mr. Broadhurst, Samuel Northcliff, and finally and simply the Fat Controller. Loudmouthed, impeccably tailored, and a fount of bombastic erudition, the Fat Controller initiates Ian into the dark secrets of his arts -- of marketing, money, and the human psyche -- and takes Ian, and the reader, on a wild voyage around the edges of reality. As we careen into the twenty-first century, Self perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our times: money is the only common language; consumerism, violence, and psychosis (drug-induced and otherwise) prevail; and the human soul has become the ultimate product.
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Why Read: Selected Writings 2001–2021
by Will Self
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.
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$27.00
Elaine
by Will Self
The Booker Prize-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. Will 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 Places Her Marriage To An Ivy League Academic And Former Communist Party Member In Peril. Based On The Intimate Diaries Self's Mother Kept For More Than 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, Putting His Stylistic Talents To Tremendous Effect-- Provided By Publisher.
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Junk Mail
by Will Self
Will Self is one of the most important British novelists of his generation, and he is as acclaimed in the UK for his outstanding, daring journalism as he is for his fiction. Now finally available in America, Junk Mail is an original selection of pieces from Self's nonfiction and journalism that will introduce American readers to Self as a literary journalist par excellence.
Animated by the scathing brilliance and unflinching determination to walk the road less traveled, Junk Mail is an often irreverent trawl through a landscape of drugs, culture, art, literature, and current events topics Self illuminates with a keen and entirely original eye. We follow Self into the operation of an upstanding crack dealer, behind the myth of the "pragmatist" approach to drug legalization on the streets of Amsterdam, and to lunch with Indian author Salman Rushdie. Whether he is writing about bad boy British artist Damien Hirst, how literary renegade William Burroughs has changed our outlook on art and intoxication, or what the current state of transsexuality has to say about gender for all of us, this is a lively and necessary anthology from one of the defining voices of our times.
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The Undivided Self: Selected Stories
by Will Self
Since the release of his first story collection in 1991, Will Self has been hailed as a master of the short story. Now, for the first time, selected stories from his five highly praised collections will be available in one volume, introduced by Rick Moody. These stories, drawn from The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Gray Area, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, and Liver―plus one story never before published―give us unexpected comic twists, masterful language, and the ordinary colored by the absurd: a man who finds his mother walking in a London suburb ten months after her death; the odd nuances of a drab office worker's daily routine; and a send-up of the British elite that takes place after a carcinogenic fog blankets England. Compared favorably to Nabokov, Pynchon, Gaddis, Ballard, and DeLillo, Will Self is a bold satirist whose selected stories represent some of the best and most outrageous fiction of the last decade.
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The Book of Dave: A Novel
by Will Self
When cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife of five years deserts him for another man, taking their only child with her, he is thrown into a tailspin of doubt and discontent. Fearing his son will never know his father, Dave pens a gripping text―part memoir, part deranged philosophical treatise, and part handbook of "the Knowledge" learned by all London cab drivers. Meant for the boy when he comes of age, the book captures the frustration and anxiety of modern life. Five hundred years later, the Book of Dave is discovered by the inhabitants on the island of Ham, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportion, and its author is revered as a mighty prophet.
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The Butt: A Novel
by Will Self
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 threaten to upset the tenuous balance of peace in a not-too-distant land. When he flips the butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of his vacation apartment, it lands on elderly Reggie Lincoln, lounging on the balcony below. Lincoln suffers a burn, and the local authorities charge Tom with assault―in a country with draconian anti-smoking laws, a cigarette is a weapon of offense. For reparation, Tom must leave his family behind and wander through the arid center of the country's deserted territory. Joining Tom on his journey is Brian Prentice, a mysteriously sinister presence, who has his own sins to make up for. Inevitably, the two men encounter violence, forcing them to come together despite their seething mistrust. A profoundly disturbing allegory, The Butt reveals the heart of a distinctly modern darkness.
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The Butt: A Novel
by Will Self
"John Gray meets Joseph Conrad, Apocalypse Now meets Graham Greene, Russell Hoban meets Mad Max, J. G . Ballard meets himself. From the flip of the butt onward, Sartre presides over it all."―Guardian
When Tom Brodzinksi flicks his last cigarette out of his hotel window, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that threaten to upset the tenuous balance of peace in a not-too-distant dystopian land…A profoundly disturbing allegory, The Butt reveals the heart of a distinctly modern darkness.
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Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes
by Will Self
British satirist Will Self spins four interconnected stories into a brilliantly insightful commentary on human foibles and resilience.
Will Self's remarkable new stories center on the disease and decay that target the largest of human organs: the liver. Set in locales as toxic as a London drinking club and mundane as a clinic in an ultraorderly Swiss city, the stories distill the hard lives of their subjects whether alcoholic, drug addict, or cancer patient. I n "Fois Humane," set at the Plantation Club, it's always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter, and the shivering denizens of this dusty realm spend their days observing its proprietor as he force-feeds the barman vodkaspiked beer. Joyce Beddoes, protagonist of "Leberknödel," has terminal liver cancer and is on her way to be euthanized in Zurich when, miraculously, her disease goes into remission. In "Prometheus" a young copywriter at London's most cutting edge ad agency has his liver nibbled by a griffon thrice daily, but he's always in the pink the following morning and ready to make that killer pitch. If blood and bile flow through liverish London, the two arteries meet in "Birdy Num Num," where "career junky" Billy Chobham performs little services for the customers who gather to wait for the Man, while in his blood a virus pullulates. A moving portrayal of egos, appetites and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary achievement.
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Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes
by Will Self
A collection of four related stories, centered on the largest of human organs: the liver. In a dusty London drinking club and an efficient euthanasia clinic, a glossy ad agency and a junky's windowless flat, Self's characters are slowly losing their livers―to cirrhosis, to cancer, to a hungry griffon vulture. Through the organic woes of these afflicted individuals, Self considers appetites and addictions, disease and decay, in a way that is at once demented, funny, and moving.
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George Condo: Mental States
by David Means, Will Self, Ralph Rugoff, Laura Hoptman, George Condo
Painter and sculptor George Condo (born 1957) has inhabited a broad swath of cultural contexts over his three-decade career, from the early-1980s East Village scene to a collaboration with William Burroughs to making album cover art for Phish and, most recently, Kanye West. Early in his career, Condo was friendly with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and briefly worked at Andy Warhol's Factory. Having been included in the Whitney Biennial in 1987, by 2010 he was once again judged so original that a bronze sculpture of his was placed in that year's Biennial. Condo's loose, imaginative approach to portraiture has distinguished him throughout the decades: "There was a time when I realized that the central focal point of portraiture did not have to be representational in any way," he said in 1992. "You don't need to paint the body to show the truth about a character. All you need is the head and the hands." George Condo: Mental States surveys the artist's career from 1982 to the present day, focusing on his portrait paintings but also including a selection of sculptural busts made in materials such as gold and bronze. Organized by theme, and including 100 images of artworks in addition to writings by Will Self, David Means, Ralph Rugoff and Laura Hoptman, this volume explores Condo's relationship to art history, popular culture and contemporary society.
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Liver
by Will Self
In this collection of four linked stories, newly reissued by Grove, Will Self takes aim at the disease and decay that target the largest of human organs: the liver. Set in locales as toxic as a London drinking club and mundane as a clinic in an orderly Swiss city, the stories distill the hard lives of their subjects, whether alcoholic, drug addict, or cancer patient. In “Foie Humaine,” set at the Plantation Club, it’s always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter, and the shivering denizens of this dusty realm spend their days observing its proprietor as he force-feeds the barman vodka-spiked beer. Joyce Beddoes, protagonist of “Leberknödel,” has terminal liver cancer and is on her way to be euthanized in Zurich when, miraculously, her disease goes into remission. In “Prometheus,” a young copywriter at London’s most cutting-edge ad agency has his liver nibbled by a griffon thrice daily, but he’s always in the pink the following morning and ready to make that killer pitch. If blood and bile flow through liverish London, the two arteries meet in “Birdy Num Num,” where career junky Billy Chobham performs little services for the customers who gather to wait for the Man, while in his blood a virus pullulates. A moving portrayal of egos, appetites, and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most talented minds working today.
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The Butt
by Will Self
When Tom Brodzinksi tries to give up smoking, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that threaten to upset the tenuous balance of peace in a not-too-distant land. When he flips the butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of his vacation apart-ment, it lands on elderly Reggie Lincoln, lounging on the balcony below. Lincoln suf-fers a burn, and the local authorities charge Tom with assault―in a country with draconian anti-smoking laws, a cigarette is a weapon of offense. For reparation, Tom must leave his family behind and wander through the arid center of the country’s deserted territory. Joining Tom on his journey is Brian Prentice, a mysteriously sin-ister presence, who has his own sins to make up for. Inevitably, the two men en-counter violence, forcing them to come together despite their seething mistrust. Refusing facile moral certitudes, The Butt is set in a distorted world, a country that is part Australia, part Iraq, and part the heart of a distinctively modern darkness.
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The Book of Dave
by Will Self
One of Will Self’s best-loved novels, newly reissued by Grove, The Book of Dave begins when East End cabdriver Dave Rudman’s wife takes from him his only son. In response, Dave pens a savage jeremiad against the contemporary world that filters his fearful bigotry through religious mania, with a generous dose of the London cabby’s unique knowledge of the sprawling city. Dave buries the book in his ex-wife’s Hampstead backyard, intending it for his son, Carl, when he comes of age. Five hundred years later, Dave’s book is found by the inhabitants of Ham, a primitive archipelago in post-apocalyptic London, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportions and the template for a new civilization.
Equal parts dystopian fantasy, religious allegory, detective story, and tribute to the sometimes fraught relations between fathers and sons, The Book of Dave is an ingenious meditation upon the nature of religion and a caustic satire of contemporary life.
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The Quantity Theory of Insanity
by Will Self
What if 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 the 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.
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The Quantity Theory of Insanity
by Will Self
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.
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