Will Self: Encyclopedia - Will Self

Will Self

Will Self (born 1961) is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist who was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. Will Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes. These include

• Cock and Bull (1992) — the stories of a man and a woman who develop sexual organs of the opposite sex.
• My Idea of Fun (1996) — a lonely boy grows up just outside Brighton in a caravan park with his over-sexual mother and Samual Northcliff who takes the boy on a disturbing and often violent journey.
• Great Apes (1997) — a man who wakes up in a world where chimpanzees have taken the place of humans.
• How the Dead Live (2000) — an old lady dies, only to be moved to a London suburb where the dead have taken residence.
• Dorian (2002) — a modern take on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"All my work is highly personal; it's more personal than me. You know, reading my books is having a far more intimate relationship with me than having a relationship with me."

His shorter fiction includes:

• The Quantity Theory of Insanity (Short Stories) 1991
• Grey Area (Short Stories) 1994
• Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Short Stories) 1998
• Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (Short Stories) 2004
• The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (Illustrated Novella) 1996

Like Salman Rushdie Will Self loads his fiction with references and allusions to modern culture (both high and low) and like Rushdie he is probably the only person able to recognise them all. The influences on his fiction mentioned most frequently include J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson often not for purely literary reasons. Alonside these he has cited such diverse writers as Jonathan Swift, Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Celine as formative influences on his writing style. Martin Amis is often mentioned alongside Self; Self went to interview him but they ended up having more of a discussion about each other's work and lives - it is known that they have tremendous respect for each other.

Self has also compiled several books of work from his newspaper columns - Junk Mail (1996) and Feeding Frenzy (2001) - which mix interviews with counter-culture figures, restaurant reviews and literary criticism. He has made several appearances on British television, notably as a contestant on Have I Got News For You and as a regular on Shooting Stars and Grumpy Old Men. He gained a degree of infamy in 1997 when he was sent by the British broadsheet newspaper The Observer to cover the electoral campaign of John Major, and was subsequently fired from the newspaper after taking heroin on the Prime Minister's jet.

He says "I want to be misunderstood. And the other thing that amuses me is: I don't particularly want to be liked. Nobody goes into the business of writing satire to be liked. Whether I am or am not a nice bloke is neither here nor there. It's not part of the task I've set myself in my art."

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Will Self", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki