Geïllustreerde novelle van Brits societyfiguur Will Self, en meteen ook het eerste dat ik van hem las. Door de verwijzing naar 50s classic The Sweet Smell Of Success meteen al een mediasatire, maar dan van de vunzige soort. Richard Hermes is een van de vele pseudo-journalisten die in een smerig, ...
Soooo when I’m reading a book, I’ll sit with a flashcard and write down all the new words/words I didn’t know had different forms/ words it would not occur to me to write, and then I upload the words to Anki so that I can test myself on them and hopefully memorise them. I’ve been doing this for a...
Who says short story collections have to be 30% filler? Will Self hits eight consecutive balls out of the proverbial park with his third collection of short fiction, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys. Whether writing a story about two drug-dealing brothers who find a stratum of crack beneat...
Note: This review was written on Aug 19th 2007 when the writer was a doe-eyed yoof of twenty.Were2guv? The Island of Ham?The latest doorstopper from the Prometheus of contemporary storytelling Will Self is a work of catatonic, lucid and breathtaking speculative fiction, alternating between a post...
Some thoughts on Will Self’s How The Dead Live. The first 280 or so pages deliver the constant narrative pleasure of some illicit drug. One is constantly buoyed along by the wonderful storytelling.American Lily Bloom, twice-married, now a widow living in London, is dying of cancer--and then stone...
Will self is an interesting personality in the literary world. Across the internet there seems to be an abundance of people who either find him annoying, obnoxious or overly self-indulgent. On the other hand there are some people dotted around on Goodreads and other literary forums who seem to th...
Cock and Bull is two independent stories back to back; connected through their core theme of an person who develops secondary genitalia, of the opposite gender. I didn't read them back to back – instead I read the first story, Cock, during a slow period in a non-fiction book on English grammar an...
I 1st read mention of Will Self in a text by Stewart Home. Home insulted Self as being something along the lines of a rich Oxford junkie who doesn't deserve his reputation as an underground writer. Since I'd never heard of Self before, he had no reputation w/ me at all. Knowing Stewart's tende...
Self's title here works two ways. His Dorian is an imitation of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Self's Dorian Gray, which is to say his hero, is an imitation of whatever he needs to be, given the situation at hand. Numerous times the narrator refers to this man as a chameleon, and indeed the...
This second collection of stories is a technical improvement over its predecessor, Self's debut The Quantum Theory of Insanity. Here the stories develop at a much faster pace and because of such are often shorter than the aforementioned earlier stories. The second half of this book is stronger th...