Will Self's Blog

Will Self’s new novel Elaine will be published in September 2024.

Will discusses the impact of the web, the internet, social media and the handheld computer (also known as a ‘phone’) on the practice of reading in the 21st century. Drawing on his book Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021, he’ll present a complex picture of discontinuous adaptation to new media, and interrogate whether the transition is a gain overall for the human psyche and its societies… or a net loss. Suitable for high school students. The event is given in memory of Simon Heald.

To buy ti...

Via Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris.

I think about Adrian Chiles’s cock more than is strictly necessary — which is pretty obviously: at all, unless you happen to be Adrian Chiles, his sexual partner, or his doctor (should Chiles be afflicted with a disease affecting his cock).

I didn’t even really know who Chiles was much before I acquired this problem – I had a vague idea he was a television and radio presenter, but since I don’t watch the former, and don’t listen to the radio station he broadcasts on, Chiles wasn’t in my world.

Will is going to be at the Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival at the Amelia Scott, 7pm Saturday May 13 taking up some of the arguments he put forward in his latest book, Why Read, a collection of essays on writing and literature.

A review of Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu in the Nation.

I thought my anti-monarchy feelings had become fairly torpid in recent years – there’s been so much to be unhappy and discontented about … But the slavish response of the British press and public to the Queen’s death, followed by an equally servile and sententious one to the publication of ‘Spare’ made me realise an important thing: no one seemed capable any more of framing their response to these royal ructions within an assumed – and profound – critique of the institution itself … Yet polling ...

A new collection of Will’s non-fiction writing (following on from Junk Mail and Feeding Frenzy), Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021, is published by Grove Press in the UK on November 3, and by Grove Atlantic in the US on January 17 2023 – a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.

“Sharp, trenchant essays from an enfant terrible of modern letters…. Self effortlessly weaves his way from such lighthearted topics as shelves, the “very lynchpins of a form o...

Will is going to be in conversation with Henry Eliot about Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater) and William S. Burroughs (Junky) in Soho for the new series of the podcast On the Road with Penguin Classics released on September 29. Listen to the trailer here.

Read Will’s opinion piece on the monarchy at the Daily Beast.