Description

‘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

From 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.

Publisher Review

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 *