Will
  • Published: 16 February 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141046402
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $26.00

Will

Formats & editions
EBook
7 Nov 2019
Paperback
16 Feb 2021
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An intense and anarchic memoir of addiction from one of Britain's most original writers

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 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.
  • Published: 16 February 2021
  • ISBN: 9780141046402
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

Will Self

Will Self is the author of three short-story collections, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (winner of the 1992 Geoffrey Faber award), Grey Area and Tough Tough Toys for Touch Tough Boys; a dyad of novellas, Cock and Bull, and a third novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; and four novels, My Idea of Fun, Great Apes, How the Dead Live (shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2000) and The Book of Dave.

Together with the photographer David Gamble, he produced Perfidious Man, a sideways look at contemporary masculinity. There have been three collections of journalism, Junk Mail, Sore Sites and Feeding Frenzy. Will Self has written for a plethora of publications over the years and is a regular broadcaster on television and radio. His latest work is a collection of pieces entitled Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes.

Also by Will Self

The Book of Dave
The Examined Mind
Will Self's Great British Bus Journey
Phone
Shark
The Book of Dave
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker
See all

Praise for Will

One of the most significant literary works of our century

New Statesman on Phone

Intellectually dazzling and emotionally frazzling

Guardian on Shark

Unstoppably entertaining

The Times on Umbrella

One of Britain's most inspired writers offers a no-holds-barred tale of his fascinating life. Spectacular . . . Self delivers a hallucinatory, confessional version of his life

Kirkus

Darkly angelic prose... a joy to read, with the final part in particular recalling David Foster Wallace at his best

Alex Preston, Observer

Self's writing has the same technicolour velocity, malign comedy as his best novels

Claire Allfree, Evening Standard

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

TLS

Who else is writing with this much freedom and verve right now?

Metro