“You will be tossed about in the roiling ocean of words that make up the stream-of-consciousness narrative Self favors . . . the riptide force of Self’s postmodern brilliance will suck you in. . . . Shark is as trippy and fanciful as falling down a rabbit hole . . . pushes me out of my comfort zone. . . Persistence pays off because Shark will stir up a reading frenzy.” —Carol Memmott, Chicago Tribune

“[Self’s] text is more ocean than land, a strange, fluid, weightless place where present and past, surface and depth constantly converge, where terrors, both literal and psychic, loom. . . . It’s a throwback to modernism, a continuation of the experiments of his literary influences, especially James Joyce and J.G. Ballard. . . . Fans of experimental fiction will likely devour the book and applaud Self for inventing a dark stream of consciousness all his own.” —Porter Shreve, Washington Post

“Shark has no time for pause and no space for blankness, churning up clumps of words and polyrhythmic phrases and sounds at a breakneck pace. . . . [Shark is]an attempt to offer unfettered access to the minds of the book’s characters. . . . here is a hunk of modernism that poignantly, beautifully, and, it seems, genuinely render mental states of sanity and insanity while smudging the gradations in between.” —Full Stop

“Self’s sentences move with sharky verve: a playful, allusive, associative flow that traces frantic minds connecting the dots between past and present, ideals and reality. . . . Shark will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain. Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.” —James Kidd, Independent

“A journey of language, of character, of unsettling fragmented narratives, of tricks, twists and turns. Shark will latch on to you and pull you under if you’re not careful—and that’s a good thing.” —Ryan Peverly, Lit Reactor

“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. . . . There is an amazing consistency to his tone and style; he holds the narrative firmly together at all times, however random and complicated the structure of the book may appear. . . . It’s a considerable task he’s taken on here, but he pulls it off with aplomb, humor and style. . . . An outstanding work of literature that seeks to question and explore the fundamental components of what constitutes ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behavior in our society. . . . Go read it now. You’ll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled—and laugh your ass off.” —J.P. O’malley, NPR Books

“Intellectually dazzling . . . Shark confirms that Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidably 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.” —Stuart Kelly, Guardian

“A maddening, uncompromising, serious, self-indulgent, and beautiful work . . . comes as close to capturing the frightening bad trip of modern life as any book in recent memory.” —Publishers Weekly (boxed review)

“A truly wonderful novel . . . the language feels urgent and necessary . . . It is an exciting, mesmerizing, wonderfully disturbing book. Go with it, and it’ll suck you under.” —Jon Day, Daily Telegraph

“Highly enjoyable, vividly, even profoundly imagined. Self is creating something rather grand.” —Sunday Times

“Breathtaking and dazzling. An exhilarating tour-de-force . . . immersing the reader in a trippy Odyssey.” —Daily Mail

But it wasn’t their faces that haunted him—and it wasn’t their victims’ faces either. On that day—the day the skin angels alighted on him and commenced their vampiric feeding—there’d been a photo of Rita Hayworth torn from a movie magazine stuck to the bulkhead at the back of the cockpit . . .breast feeding, and he’d curled the sweet tongue of the chewing gum he was offered into his dry mouth, and he’d taken a look through the Norden bombsight out of courtesy to the proud bombardier, but he hadn’t done anything at all himself—only watched. Perhaps the narcissistic shrink would’ve said this in itself was a form of doing, this voyeurism—and as culpably perverse as any sadism. Yet how could you desire to watch what you’d never seen before, never so much as entertained the existence of before: these others, these Windmill girls who cavorted for him in skimpy skin skirts . . . torn from their own bellies and who, batting their lidless eyes, seduced him again annagain, while silently screamingly entreating him with their lipless mouths . . . We are Jap-a-nese, if you ple-ease . . .