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Full Description
'Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers.' New York
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 humour infuse every piece.
Contents
1: Why Read? 2: The Death of the Shelf 3: Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: W. G. Sebald and the Holocaust 4: Chernobyl 5: Kafka's Wound 6: A Care Home for Novels: The Narrative Art Form in the Age of Its Technical Supersession 7: The Last Typewriter Engineer 8: Isenshard 9: How Should We Read? 10: Junky 11: Being a Character 12: Australia and I 13: The Rise of the Machines 14: Literary Time 15: The Printed Word in Peril 16: The Secret Agent 17: What to Read? 18: On Writing Memoir 19: Apocalypse Then 20: The Technology of Journalism 21: St George for the French 22: Will Self-Driving Cars Take My Job? 23: Reading for Writers
