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A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes
by Will Self
These remarkable new pieces from Will Self each feature the largest of our internal organs: the liver, in varying states of disease and decay. In "Foie Humane" we go inside a Soho drinking club, the denizens of which live in a highly stylised yet emotionally dead state of excess. "Prometheus" tells the story of a dazzlingly successful advertising copywriter who can sell anything to anyone at any time. But things go wrong when he meets Zeus, a bigshot entrepreneur with a beautiful and manipulative wife. Tony Phillips' subterranean Kensington flat is the setting for "Birdy Num Num," where obsessives spend their days in a crepuscular realm of cocaine and heroin. Finally, in "Leberknodel', a terminal liver cancer patient travels to Zurich to commit assisted suicide. When she arrives, however, the cancer mysteriously goes into remission.
BookBrowsers Ask Annelise Ryan, author of the Monster Hunter mystery series
I normally ask our visiting authors to tell us a bit about themselves, and then we pepper them with questions. In this case, I found that Annelise (aka Beth) had already posted an entertaining intro https://bethamos.com/ on her website that addresses many of the questions we'd typically ask. To a...
-kim.kovacs
"The reliably diabolical Self delivers four longish stories about decay, debauchery and deliverance...despite the occasional hiccup, Self's parts function quite well together to produce a picture of putrid beauty." - Publishers Weekly
"Each story has a distinctive voice—Self employs linguistic bravado in all—but deals with the same ideas and reaches the same conclusion: we are destroying ourselves; so what?" - Library Journal
"Brilliant and blistering, when not overinfatuated with addiction or in undisciplined pursuit of flights of fancy - an intermittently dazzling collection from a restless talent." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Liver was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.
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