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.
