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.

Praise for Why Read:

“Whether book or restaurant reviews, travelogues, or articles on prison, politics, and penis extensions, Self’s think pieces are, for the most part, informed, acerbic, and refreshingly opinionated. A reason, then, to cheer the arrival of his latest collection . . . At routine junctures, we discern a fierce intelligence and an inquiring mind at work. Even seemingly innocuous or frivolous pieces turn out to yield deep truths and surprise delights . . . Yes, the finest essays here are incisive, perceptive, and provocative. But they are also wildly entertaining.”—Malcolm Forbes, Washington Examiner

“Whether he’s writing stylistically innovative fiction or expanding the boundaries of what nonfiction can do, Will Self has established himself as a singular and influential writer over the last few decades. The new collection Why Read offers readers highlights from 20 years of his work, with Self covering subjects ranging from George Orwell to Chernobyl. It’s a fine introduction to a major literary voice.”—Tobias Carroll, InsideHook

“Sharp, trenchant essays from an enfant terrible of modern letters . . . Plenty to ponder in this energetic, opinionated collection.”—Kirkus Reviews 

“Idiosyncratic . . . 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.”—Publishers Weekly

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

“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

Excerpt

Excerpted from Why Read © 2023 by Will Self. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.

The future St Augustine’s account of his mentor Bishop Ambrose’s reading habits, written during the fourth century of the Christian era, still stands as the first definitive account of anyone doing this: ‘When he read his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.’ Augustine’s astonishment is so palpable – while other references to such a practice prior to this are so scant – we can only infer that reading was indeed principally undertaken aloud. Certainly, with literacy uncommon in the Roman world, there were fewer readers than those desirous of knowing texts; while, with the rise of a religion in which God’s revelation took a written form, this sacred imperative joined these more mundane motivations. Suffice it to say, it isn’t until the tenth century that we gain a general sense of reading becoming a solitary pursuit rather than a collective endeavour.

So why do it? Why bury your head in a book? Because let’s face it, the experience of solitary reading is qualitatively different from being read to aloud in a group – the former entails a deeper absorption in the text, and a more direct engagement with the mind shaping its language: immersive private reading leads one into a virtual reality, while being told a story with others keeps you in a social one. The analogy might be on the one hand with the individual liberty of conscience implicit in the Protestant confession, and on the other with collectively uttered Catholic credo. However, I suspect if you’ve even got this far you’re a reader anyway – and have now further self-selected by showing an interest not just in the text, but also – if you like – in the meta-text: what lies beyond the text that shapes our apprehension of it. In which case, you almost certainly know why you yourself read: it’s self-evidently to do with your enjoyment, experienced as the free play of your imagination, the stimulation of your intellect, and the engagement of your sympathy. But as to why it should be reading specifically that enables this – and what other values we project onto this ability – these are different questions, the answers to which may provide us with some insight into the vexed further one: whither reading?