Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 2021

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'Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the mostfascinating of the tradition's torch bearers.' - New York

From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed 'the most daringand delightful novelist of his generation' by the Guardian, Will Self's Why Read is a cornucopiaof thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.

Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusionzone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback and to literary forms past and future. With hischaracteristic 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 andprovocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs's Junky from shocking pulp novelto beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readershow, what and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writingon the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on theimpossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self's trademark intoxicatingprose and mordant, energetic humour infuse every piece.

Reviews

The finest essays here are incisive, perceptive and provocative. But they are also wildly entertaining. * Washington Examiner *
Sharp, trenchant essays from an enfant terrible of modern letters...[there's] plenty to ponder in this energetic, opinionated collection * Kirkus Reviews *
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 *
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 *
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 has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness. * New York Review of Books *

Author Bio

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, TheBook of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, andUmbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. He lives in south London.