Showing results for "Will Self" in Genre Fiction

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril.

Will Self is one of the most important British novelists of his generation, and he is as acclaimed in the UK for his outstanding, daring journalism as he is for his fiction. Now finally available in America, Junk Mail is an original selection of pieces from Self's nonfiction and journalism that will introduce American listeners to Self as a literary journalist par excellence.

While making his first tours of the hospital at which he has just begun working, maverick psychiatrist Zachary Busner notices that many of the patients exhibit a strange physical tic: rapid, precise movements that they repeat over and over. One of these patients is Audrey Dearth, an elderly woman born in the slums of West London in 1890. Audrey’s memories of a bygone Edwardian London, her lovers, involvement with early feminist and socialist movements, and, in particular, her time working in an umbrella shop, alternate with Busner’s attempts to treat her condition and bring light to her clouded world.

It looks like it's going to be quite a Christmas for Richard Hermes, powdered with cocaine and whining with the white noise of urban derangement. Not so much enfolded as trapped in the bosom of the most venal media clique in London, Richard is losing it on all fronts: He's losing his heart to Ursula Bentley, a nubile and vacuous magazine columnist; he's in danger of losing his job at the pretentious listings magazine Rendezvous; he's losing his mind....

Lily Bloom is an aging American transplanted to England who has lost her battle with cancer and lies wasting away at the Royal Ear Hospital. As her two daughters lumpy Charlotte, who runs a hugely successful chain of stationery stores called Waste of Paper, and beautiful Natasha, a junkiebuzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily slides in and out of the present, taking us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage.

May 4th, 1970. A week earlier President Nixon has ordered American ground forces into Cambodia to pursue the Vietcong. By the end of the day four students will be shot dead by the National Guard on the grounds of Kent State University. On the other side of the Atlantic, it's a brilliant sunny morning after an April of heavy rain, and at the "Concept House" therapeutic community he has set up outside London, maverick psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner has been tricked into joining a decidedly ill-advised LSD trip.

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a new collection of corkscrewed tales from the author of Great Apes. The Guardian (London) describes Will Self as "a wayward genius", and you can find out why when you observe the author's pitiless dissection of the foibles of men, women, and the Volvo 760 Turbo.

In Craven House, among the shifting, uncertain world of the English boardinghouse, with its sad population of the shabby genteel on the way down and the eternal optimists who would never get up or on, the young Patrick Hamilton, with loving, horrified fascination, first mapped out the territory that he would make uniquely his own. Although many of Hamilton's lifelong interests are here, they are handled with a youthful brio and optimism conspicuously absent from his later work.

Henry Wotton, gay, drug addicted, and husband of Batface, the irrefutably aristocratic daughter of the Duke of This or That, is at the center of a clique dedicated to dissolution. His friend Baz Hallward, an artist, has discovered a young man who is the very epitome of male beauty - Dorian Gray. His installation Cathode Narcissus captures all of Dorian's allure, and, perhaps, something else.

A British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through LA freeways and eroding English cliffs, skewering celebrity as he attempts to solve a crime: who killed the movies. A satirical novel of otherworldly proportion and literary brilliance, Walking to Hollywood is a fantastical and unforgettable trip through the unreality of our culture.

Meet Eve. She's a dreamer, a feeler, a careening well of sensitivities who can't quite keep her feet on the ground, or steer clear of trouble. She's a laugher, a crier, a quirky and quick-witted bleeding-heart worrier. Meet Ben. He's an engineer, an expert at leveling floors who likes order, structure, and straight lines. He doesn't opine, he doesn't ruminate, he doesn't simmer until he boils over. So naturally, when the two first cross paths, sparks don't exactly fly. But then they meet again. And again. And then, finally, they find themselves with a deep yet fragile connection....

Phone tells the story of two men: Zack Busner and Jonathan De'Ath. Busner is a psychiatrist who has made his name through his unorthodox treatment of psychological damage, such as giving the controversial drug L-DOPA to patients ravaged by encephalitis, or administering LSD to World War II PTSD-sufferers. But now Busner's own mind is fraying: Alzheimer's is shredding his memory and his newest possession is a shiny smartphone given to him by his introverted grandson Ben.

These are stories that delve into the modern psyche with unsettling and darkly satiric results. "Inclusion" tells the story of a doctor who is illegally testing a new antidepressant made from bee excrement. "A Short History of the English Novel" brings us face to face with a pompous publisher who is greeted at every turn by countless rejected authors.