Self, Will – The Bell Bookshop

Elaine

Emma — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity’ GuardianStanding by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, 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 ends her marriage and upends her life.Based on the intimate diaries Will Self’s mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Elaine

Emma — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Why read

Emma — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘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.

Why Read

Emma — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Will

Emma — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

‘Darkly angelic prose… a joy to read, with the final part in particular recalling David Foster Wallace at his best’ Alex Preston, Observer
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Will’s mother’s hokey homily, Waste not, want not… hisses in his ears as he oscillates furiously on the spot, havering on the threshold between the bedroom and the dying one… all the while cradling the plastic leech of the syringe in the crook of his arm. Oscillating furiously, and, as he’d presses the plunger home a touch more… and more, he hears it again and again: Waaaste nooot, waaant nooot..! whooshing into and out of him, while the blackness wells up at the periphery of his vision, and his hackneyed heart begins to beat out weirdly arrhythmic drum fills – even hitting the occasional rim-shot on his resonating rib cage. He waits, paralysed, acutely conscious, that were he simply to press his thumb right home, it’ll be a cartoonish death: That’s all folks! as the aperture screws shut forever.

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‘Self’s writing has the same technicolour velocity, malign comedy as his best novels’ Evening Standard

‘Refreshing . . . Self is never happier than when frolicking in the hinterland between sincerity and performative, winking hyperbole’ TLS

Psychogeography

Emma — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Provocateurs Will Self and Ralph Steadman join forces in this post-millennial meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place in a globalised world, bringing together for the first time the very best of their ‘Psychogeography’ columns for the Independent.

The introduction, ‘Walking to New York’, is both a prelude to the verbal and visual essays that make up this extraordinary collaboration, and a revealing exploration of the split in Self’s Jewish-American-British psyche and its relationship to the political geography of the post-9/11 world.

Ranging from the Scottish Highlands to Istanbul and from Morocco to Ohio, Will Self’s engaging and disturbing vision is perfectly counter-pointed by Ralph Steadman’s edgy and beautiful artwork.