Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including most recently Elaine, from Grove Press in 2024; Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London. will-self.com
""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 York Magazine ""Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel.""--Guardian ""Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it's as if he is the first person to see anything at all.""--New York Times ""Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . . . The reward is a strange, vivid book.""--New Yorker ""Self's prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.""--Independent ""Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self's unrestricted writing . . . You'll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled--and laugh your ass off.""--NPR ""Will Self's Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief.""--New Statesman ""Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . . . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion.""--New York Review of Books