Will Self on life, love and liver
Listen online: An exclusive interview with novelist and broadcaster Will Self, plus an excerpt from his performance at the 2008 Ilkley Literature Festival.
Will's new book, Liver, is a collection of short stories each featuring 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.
In this podcast, Will talks to the Yorkshire Post's Digital Editor David Behrens about the book, the state of his own liver... and his fondness for walking the Holderness coast.
_____________________
HOW TO LISTEN
Use the links to the right to:
- Play the programme now
- Download it to your iPod or MP3 player
- Subscribe to receive all our podcasts automatically, as soon as they're available
_____________________
Will Self was born in London in 1961. He graduated from Oxford University and began writing fiction, working as a cartoonist for the New Statesman and City Limits, a London listings magazine.
Nominated in 1993 as one of Granta magazine's 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2', his fiction includes three short-story collections: The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Grey Area (1994), and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998). Cock and Bull (1992) consists of two novellas, and he is also the author of four novels: My Idea of Fun (1993), Great Apes (1997), How the Dead Live (2000) and Dorian (2002), a retelling of Oscar Wilde's classic tale set in late 20th-century Britain.
His non-fiction includes Perfidious Man (2000), described by his publisher as 'an examination of modern masculinity' with photographs by David Gamble, and Sore Sites (2000), a collection of writings about architecture. In addition, he has published two collections of journalism, Junk Mail (1995), and, most recently, Feeding Frenzy (2001), which includes writing from the period 1995-2000. In 2002 he took part in a 'reality art' project in a one-bedroom flat on the 20th floor of a tower block in Liverpool, writing a short piece of fiction while being watched by members of the public.
Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes, 18.99, is published by Viking, ISBN: 978-0670889976.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Thursday 09 February 2012
Today
Light sleet
Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: South
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: -8 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
Wind direction: South east
