Will Self

Matthew Beaumont

""Nightwalking is, in both the physical and the moral meanings of the term, deviant. At night, in other words, the idea of wandering cannot be dissociated from the idea of erring - wanderring. This elision or semantic slurring is present in the final lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), where the poet offers a glimpse, for perpetuity, of Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from Paradise, entering the post-lapsarian world on foot: 'They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.' Wandering steps. In a double sense, Adam and Eve are errant: at once itinerant and aberrant. They are condemned to a life of ceaseless, restless sinfulness. ""--

A Nocturnal History of London

Nightwalking

Simon wakes up to find that his girlfriend has turned into a chimpanzee, and although he, too, has become a chimpanzee, he is certain he is still human but is confined to a psychiatric ward where he is cared for by the odd Dr. Busner. Reprint.

Great Apes

A collection of short stories explores the possibility that sanity is a commodity in short supply, the afterlife is as mundane as life on earth, and an anthropological expedition could discover a tribe of very boring natives

Together with Five Supporting Propositions

The Quantity Theory of Insanity

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2012 A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, Ulysses Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden - maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades. A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences. Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive? Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.

Umbrella

Dave Rudman, a disgruntled East End taxi driver, writes down his woes, frustrations, and pet peeves and buries them, only to have them discovered five hundred years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remnants of London.

A Novel

The Book of Dave

A contemporary retelling of the themes in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray finds homosexual and drug addict Henry Wotton at the center of a clique that includes his artist friend, Hallward, and the beautiful young Dorian, in a story set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic. Reprint.

An Imitation

Dorian

Full of surrealism, satire, and sexual ambiguity, this pairing of two novelettes traces the adventures of a woman who grows a penis and a man who ends up with a vagina and other female parts. Reprint.

Cock & Bull

Surrounded by her two daughters, Lily Bloom, an aging American in the final stages of cancer, spends her time in a bed in Central London's Royal Ear Hospital, drugged with painkillers, moving in and out of consciousness, and railing against the unfairness of the world around, the sins of those around her, and her coming death. Reprint.

How the Dead Live

John Arden

An international financier and his young apprentice form the center of a wickedly acute story of capitalism run amuck, in a society in which consumerism, violence, and psychosis are the norm and the human soul becomes the ultimate product. Reprint.

Plays

Scale

Cock and Bull

A collection of nine stories includes "Between the Conceits," about the eight individuals who control all London, and "Inclusion," about the inexorable side effects of a revolutionary new antidepressant made from Amazonian bee excrement

And Other Stories

Grey Area

From the author of Great Apes and Grey Area comes a new selection of offbeat short fiction that satirizes the follies and foibles of men and women, in such works as "Flytopia," "A Story for Europe," "Caring, Sharing," and "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz." Reprint.

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

Shiva Mukti is a hardworking and conscientious psychhiatrist, who, in the inauspicious surroundings of St Mungo's does his level best to staunch the flow of mental illness. But Mukti is not a happy man.

Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

Tough, tough toys for tough, tough boys

Junk mail

After a night of routine debauchery in London's clubland, the artist Simon Dykes falls asleep - only to wake up to find his girlfriend has been transmogrified into a chimp. Indeed the whole of London, though functioning normally, is run and inhabited by chimps. Can the great chimp-doctor, Zack Busner, cure him of his illusion that he's human? A wonderfully funny and clever novel that manages too to evoke great feelings of pity and sadness in the reader, this is in effect a meditation on how we treat animals.

Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo (Pocket Penguins S.)

Meet Jonathan De'Ath, aka 'the Butcher'. The curious thing about the Butcher is that everyone who knows him - his washed-up old university lecturer father, his jumbling-bumbling mother, his hippy-dippy brothers, his so-called friends, his spooky colleagues and his multitudinous lovers - they all apply this epithet to him quite independently, each in ignorance of the others. He knows everyone calls him 'the Butcher' behind his back, but he also knows that they don't know the only real secret he maintains, encrypted in the databanks of his steely mind: Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, highly-trained tank commander - is Jonathan De'Ath's longtime lover.

Phone

In 1975, five years after being tricked into going on an ill-advised LSD trip, maverick psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner realizes the true nature of the events that transpired on that dread-soaked day.

Will Self

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