Praise for Will An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Biography & Memoirs) "Good copy: Will isn''t short on it." --Christian Lorentzen, Airmail " Will looks back to Self''s adolescence and early 20s, when he was strung out on smack, and presents himself as a wheedling, whining bully who treated his friends, family and lovers with that junkie''s inversion of the categorical imperative: seeing others only as a means of achieving his next fix . Recalls the great wave of drug memoirs that came in the 1990s, and particularly Ann Marlow''s superb, genre-bending How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z . The book is a joy to read, with the final part in particular recalling David Foster Wallace at his best .There''s more than mere nostalgic pleasure in this gleefully self-lacerating memoir of drug abuse and rehab." -- Guardian "Harrowing--and, occasionally, humorous . Much to his credit, Self shows us everything (emphasis on every), thus defusing any chance of readers romanticizing his buying-and-selling days as an extended hedonistic vacation . Readers of William S.
Burroughs and Beat literature, as well as experiential journals from Djuna Barnes, Paul Bowles, and Hunter S. Thompson will find here much to endure and enjoy." -- Library Journal (starred review) "A painfully honest exploration of the nightmare of addiction . A keen, remarkably unsparing observer of his disastrous early adulthood . His manic style evokes both Hunter S. Thompson and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange ." -- Book Reporter "One of Britain''s most inspired writers employs his novelist style to a chronicle of his addictions . A third-person, no-holds-barred tale of [Self''s] fascinating life .
His readers won''t be surprised by this heady stew of J.G. Ballard, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick . The prose is consistently spectacular . A tale of addiction and consequences by the singular Self earns its shock and awe." -- Kirkus Reviews "[Self''s] memoir finds recovery in the form of friendships and the miracle that he somehow found the resolve to survive.
" -- Booklist Praise for Will Self "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 "Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel." -- Guardian "Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it''s as if he is the first person to see anything at all." -- New York Times "Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . The reward is a strange, vivid book." -- New Yorker "Self''s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive.
Prepare to be eaten whole." -- Independent "Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self''s unrestricted writing . You''ll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled--and laugh your ass off." --NPR "Will Self''s Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief." -- New Statesman "[ Phone ] delivers a hurricane of satire and suspense . A novel of grand ideas, powered by a ravenous curiosity about the role of the technological revolution in our private and public woes . William S.
Burroughs, meet John le Carré." -- Financial Times "Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion." -- New York Review of Books.