Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 23 October 2008.
Please note that we are currently unable to provide an extract from this title.
An amazing jacket which can't help but catch your eye brings you to four new short stories all based around the largest internal human organ in varying states of disease. Self brings his usual acid tongue and satire to each tale, a darkly funny read.
Liver - Booker prize nominee Will Self's extraordinary examination of lives out of control 'Magnificent, horribly funny' The Times 'Brilliant. One of the most manically imaginative writers at work today' Financial Times 'This is what Self does best: snap-shots of decline and high-concept satires of the "slapstick of addiction" ' Sunday Telegraph 'The best work of Self's I've read' Literary Review From Will Self, the Booker shortlisted author of Umbrella and the pre-eminent chronicler of our neuroses and our times, Liver is a moving, hilarious and scabrous collection of stories about egos, appetites and addictions. It will be adored by readers of Martin Amis, Irvine Welsh and David Mitchell. 'Peculiar, subtle, affecting, humane . . . busy with stylistic experiment, high-concept in-jokes, verbal impasto and flights of fancy. Tremendous fun' Guardian 'No one can revel in the disease and decay of humanity like Self' Metro 'Self is a superb stylist and the laureate of substance abuse, and these hepatic rhapsodies contain some of his most inventive writing' The Times Will Self is the author of nine novels including Cock and Bull; My Idea of Fun; Great Apes; How the Dead Live; Dorian, an Imitation; The Book of Dave; The Butt; Walking to Hollywood and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has written five collections of shorter fiction and three novellas: The Quantity Theory of Insanity; Grey Area; License to Hug; The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo; Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys; Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe and Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. Self has also compiled a number of nonfiction works, including The Undivided Self: Selected Stories; Junk Mail; Perfidious Man; Sore Sites; Feeding Frenzy; Psychogeography; Psycho Too and The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker.
'Self is...a master of demotic speech and -- rare breed this side of the Channel -- a novelist of ideas' Sunday Telegraph
'Epic and bitterly funny, this new stew of satire and linguistic wizardry is everything you'd expect from Britain's master of misanthropy' Arena
'Self has upped his ante from Monty Python to Jonathan Swift, and gone straight to brilliant hell' Harpers
Author
About Will Self
Will Self is the author of three short-story collections, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (winner of the 1992 Geoffrey Faber award), Grey Area and Tough Tough Toys for Touch Tough Boys; a dyad of novellas, Cock and Bull, and a third novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; and four novels, My Idea of Fun, Great Apes, How the Dead Live (shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2000) and The Book of Dave.
Together with the photographer David Gamble, he produced Perfidious Man, a sideways look at contemporary masculinity. There have been three collections of journalism, Junk Mail, Sore Sites and Feeding Frenzy. Will Self has written for a plethora of publications over the years and is a regular broadcaster on television and radio. His latest work is a collection of pieces entitled Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes.
