Mark Richardson on the gender wars in modern Gothic fiction In recent times it has become commonplace for writers and critics alike to link contemporary gothic narratives with modern day anxieties. Two recent Gothic novels have successfully exposed our cynical attitude towards love relations and our fear of getting too close to the Other: Dorian […]
Iain Sinclair : London Orbital : Width Of A Circle
Iain Sinclair walked the length of the M25 motorway to research his book London Orbital. Chris Hall hears why Listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme recently voted London’s M25 the worst of the “seven horrors of Britain” in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if […]
Will Self : Feeding Frenzy : Biting The Hand That Feeds
Chris Hall serves up a slice of Will Self with the publication of his second collection of journalism, Feeding Frenzy Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of your new son, Luther. Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now. CH: So […]
Will Self : How The Dead Live : Dead Man Talking
Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and he can see the “lowering storm of age and extinction” ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his prose or his physiognomy to suggest that he will become flabby or paunchy. Indeed, even though his […]
Will Self: Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Robert Clarke In his new collection of short stories, Will Self once more welcomes us to the terrifyingly trenchant world of the literary recusant. With his usual irreverent wit and unrestrained surrealism, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys sees Self move from the ridiculous to the downright absurd through a mixture of high art […]
Will Self : Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys : Pre-Millennium Tension
Robert Clarke hears why Will Self has become an uncertain satirist No other author in recent years has divided the critics with such relish as Will Self. With, three novellas and two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys, he has established himself […]
Will Self : Great Apes : Self Destruction
Chris Mitchell finds out why Will Self doesn’t give a monkeys Will Self is the man who brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “mile high club”. Unless you were in a apathy-induced coma during the run-up to the general election, (or living in another country), you can’t have failed to have seen […]
The Significance Of Names In The Fiction Of Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Will Self, Umberto Eco : Waiting For Go.Dot
Chris Hall on the significance of names in fiction and film The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name ‘Godot’ is missing from any parental ‘Book Of Names’ (although […]
