Why Read
Selected Writings 2001–2021
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
