Central Kansas Library System

Will Self has established himself as one of the most brilliant, daring, and inventive writers of his generation. My Idea of Fun is Will Self's highly acclaimed first novel. The story of a devilishly clever international financier/marketing wizard and his young apprentice, My Idea of Fun is both a frighteningly dark subterranean exploration of capitalism run rampant and a wickedly sharp, technically acute display of linguistic pyrotechnics that glows...

"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."-James Joyce, Ulysses. Radical and uncompromising, Umbrella is a tour de force from one of England's most acclaimed contemporary writers, and Self's most ambitious novel to date. Moving between Edwardian London and a suburban mental hospital in 1971, Umbrella exposes the twentieth century's technological searchlight as refracted through the dark glass of a long term mental institution. While making...

Will Self, whom the Los Angeles Times calls "the hottest young novelist in England," demonstrates his razor-sharp wit in these nine new stories. Self's method depends upon taking an ordinary aspect of the world and then pushing it to its limit in furious absurdity. The short stories in Grey Area reflect the technical brilliance and satiric voice that have made him one of the most highly praised comic writers in a decade. These are stories that delve...

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 Guards in 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 in the London suburb of Willesden, maverick psychiatrist...

One of Will Self's best-loved novels, newly reissued by Grove, The Book of Dave begins when East End cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife takes from him his only son. In response, Dave pens a savage jeremiad against the contemporary world that filters his fearful bigotry through religious mania, with a generous dose of the London cabby's unique knowledge of the sprawling city. Dave buries the book in his ex-wife's Hampstead backyard, intending it for his...

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a new collection of cork-screwed 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. Self's world is a no-funhouse of warped mirrors. A man is seduced into a misanthropically charged symbiosis with the insects infesting his cottage-he...

A brief and brilliant satire of magazine hacks and fashionistas, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis shows Will Self at the top of his form. 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...

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...