Author(s): Will Self

Essay

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a world-girdling collection of writings inspired by a life lived in and for literature.

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 humor infuse every piece.

A book that examines how the human stream of consciousness flows into and out of literature, Why Read will satisfy both old and new readers of this icon of contemporary literature.

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 *

Contents: 1: Why Read? 2: The Death of the Shelf 3: Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: W. G. Sebald and the Holocaust 4: Chernobyl 5: Kafka's Wound 6: A Care Home for Novels: The Narrative Art Form in the Age of Its Technical Supersession 7: The Last Typewriter Engineer 8: Isenshard 9: How Should We Read? 10: Junky 11: Being a Character 12: Australia and I 13: The Rise of the Machines 14: Literary Time 15: The Printed Word in Peril 16: The Secret Agent 17: What to Read? 18: On Writing Memoir 19: Apocalypse Then 20: The Technology of Journalism 21: St George for the French 22: Will Self-Driving Cars Take My Job? 23: Reading for Writers

Author Biography: 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.