Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 - 2021

Why Read? is a collection of essays on writing and literature by Will Self, exploring topics such as literature, writing, and the importance of reading in an ever-changing world. The book is filled with Self's trademark intellectual brio, moving prose, and mordant humor, and takes readers on a journey from his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, the Australian outback, and literary forms past and future.

Format: Hardback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 03 November 2022
Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press

Will Self may not be the last modernist at work, but at the moment, he is 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 humor infuse every piece.

Weight: 446g
Dimension: 144 x 224 x 34 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781611856613
Edition number: Main