Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 23 October 2008.
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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.
These remarkable new pieces from Will Self each feature the largest of our internal organs: the liver, in varying states of disease and decay. In 'Foie Humane' we go inside a Soho drinking club, the denizens of which live in a highly stylised yet emotionally dead state of excess. 'Prometheus' tells the story of a dazzlingly successful advertising copywriter who can sell anything to anyone at any time. But things go wrong when he meets Zeus, a bigshot entrepreneur with a beautiful and manipulative wife. Tony Phillips's subterranean Kensington flat is the setting for 'Birdy Num Num,' where obsessives spend their days in a crepuscular realm of cocaine and heroin. Finally, in 'Leberknodel', a terminal liver cancer patient travels to Zurich to commit assisted suicide. When she arrives, however, the cancer mysteriously goes into remission.
'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.
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