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.
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Related link: Other podcasts from the Yorkshire Post »_____________________
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.The full article contains 514 words and appears in n/a newspaper.
