Why read : selected writings 2001-2021 /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Why Read? (1)
• The Death of the Shelf (12)
• Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: W. G. Sebald and the Holocaust (25)
• Chernobyl (52)
• Kafka's Wound (75)
• A Care Home for Novels: The Narrative Art Form in the Age of Its Technical Supersession (109)
• The Last Typewriter Engineer (129)
• Isenshard (141)
• How Should We Read? (162)
• Junky (170)
• Being a Character (189)
• Australia and I (195)
• The Rise of the Machines (218)
• Literary Time (227)
• The Printed Word in Peril (232)
• The Secret Agent (255)
• What to Read? (266)
• On Writing Memoir (275)
• Apocalypse Then (285)
• The Technology of Journalism (295)
• St George for the French (301)
• Will Self-Driving Cars Take My Job? (309)
• Reading for Writers (316)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Two decades of essays and lectures on literature come together in this idiosyncratic volume from Self (Will). In answering the question posed by the title essay, which was published on the website Literary Hub in 2021, he writes "read because short of meeting and communing with them... reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding." Several pieces focus on the novel in the digital age: in "A Care Home for Novels," a 2014 lecture Self gave at Trinity College, Oxford, he muses that novels will continue to be read, though they'll be "an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music," and in "The Printed Word in Peril," published in Harper's in 2018, he admits his determination "not to rage against the dying of literature's light... but merely to examine the great technological discontinuity of our era." "The Last Typewriter Engineer," meanwhile, from the London Review of Books in 2014, is an ode to the man who services Self's typewriters, and to the machines themselves ("My stick-fingers produced satisfying percussive paradiddles, in between which came blissful fermatas"). Taken together, the candid musings are a fine mix of practicality and nostalgia. Self's fans will relish having these wide-ranging reflections in one place. (Jan.)

Kirkus Book Review

Sharp, trenchant essays from an enfant terrible of modern letters. In this wide-ranging hodgepodge of pieces, Self reveals a more personable side--a kinder, gentler, more accessible one, even if the prose may send readers scurrying to the dictionary. On a single page from his astute essay on the "otherworldliness of Kafka's prose," he uses vermiculated, velleity, inanition, and neurasthenia. The titular essay examines the powerful experience of solitary reading, which provides "direct engagement with the mind shaping its language." Besides, quips the author, it's freeing to do so whenever we want. In the witty "What to Read?" Self urges us to "read what the hell you like," later adding, "No, read what you want--but be conscious that, in this area of life as so many others, you are what you eat, and if your diet is solely pulp, you'll very likely become rather…pulpy." There's also "How Should We Read?" while "Reading for Writers" neatly concludes the collection. In between, Self effortlessly weaves his way from such lighthearted topics as shelves, the "very lynchpins of a form of bourgeois domesticity," to a lengthy, dark, autobiographical piece on W.G. Sebald and the role of the Holocaust in his writing as well as an unfortunately timely piece about his visit to "coruscating" Pripyat, near Chernobyl, at the same time as the Fukushima disaster. In "A Care Home for Novels," Self argues that the literary novel is "dying before your eyes," while another essay, from Harper's in 2018, is titled "The Printed Word in Peril." Self also delivers an insightful piece on the "gonzo journalist avant la lettre," George Orwell; a fine appreciation of William S. Burroughs and his "fiendish parable of modern alienation," Junky; and a stellar exploration of Joseph Conrad's forward thinking regarding "space, time and their odd interlinkages" in The Secret Agent. Winding down, "Apocalypse Then" is an introspective, sobering piece on climate change. Plenty to ponder in this energetic, opinionated collection. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

William Woodard "Will" Self was born on September 26, 1961. He is a British author, journalist and political commentator. He wrote ten novels, five collections of short fiction, three novellas and five collections of non-fiction writing. His novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His subject matter often includes mental illness, illegal drugs and psychiatry.

Self is a regular contributor to publications including Playboy, The Guardian, Harpers, The New York Times and the London Review of Books. He also writes a column for New Statesman, and over the years he has been a columnist for The Observer, The Times and the Evening Standard. His columns for Building Design on the built environment, and for the Independent Magazine on the psychology of place brought him to prominence as a thinker concerned with the politics of urbanism.

Will Self will deliver the closing address at the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) 2015.

(Bowker Author Biography)