Why Read
Selected Writings 2001 – 2021
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two decades of essays and lectures on literature come together in this idiosyncratic volume from Self (Will). In answering the question posed by the title essay, which was published on the website Literary Hub in 2021, he writes "read because short of meeting and communing with them... reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding." Several pieces focus on the novel in the digital age: in "A Care Home for Novels," a 2014 lecture Self gave at Trinity College, Oxford, he muses that novels will continue to be read, though they'll be "an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music," and in "The Printed Word in Peril," published in Harper's in 2018, he admits his determination "not to rage against the dying of literature's light... but merely to examine the great technological discontinuity of our era." "The Last Typewriter Engineer," meanwhile, from the London Review of Books in 2014, is an ode to the man who services Self's typewriters, and to the machines themselves ("My stick-fingers produced satisfying percussive paradiddles, in between which came blissful fermatas"). Taken together, the candid musings are a fine mix of practicality and nostalgia. Self's fans will relish having these wide-ranging reflections in one place.