What if there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to? What if a mysterious tribe in the Amazon rainforest turn out to be the most boring people on the earth? What if the afterlife is nothing more than a London suburb, where the dead get new flats, new jobs, and their own telephone directory? These are the sort of truths that emerge in this collection of stories by one of England's most gifted writers.
In The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self tips over the banal surfaces of everyday existence to...

In this new novel, Will Self turns his wicked gift for satire on a favorite victim--his fellow man. After a night of routine, pedestrian debauchery, a successful, middle-aged London painter, wakes up to find that his girlfriend has turned into a chimpanzee.

In this brief and humorous satire, a man trapped in the bosom of the most venal media clique in London is losing his heart to a magazine columnist, about to lose his job at a magazine, losing his mind to cocaine, and losing his soul to a newspaper columnist, the kingpin of media scandal.

From the author of Great Apes and Grey Area comes a new selection of offbeat short fiction that satirizes the follies and foibles of men and women, in such works as Flytopia, A Story for Europe, Caring, Sharing, and The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz.

An unforgettable portrait of the human struggle with mortality, this novel revolves around an aging American woman dying from cancer in a London hospital. Sliding in and out of consciousness, she rails against everything through the lens of her paranoid bigotry.

A collection of nine stories includes Between the Conceits, about the eight individuals who control all London, and Inclusion, about the inexorable side effects of a revolutionary new antidepressant made from Amazonian bee excrement.

This collection of Will Self's journalism and selected writings takes the reader through the turbulent years 1995-2000, covering everything from his restaurant reviews to Tate Modern and the contemporary British art scene, and cultural phenomena as diverse as voyeuristic television and the Queen Mother.

What is there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because "somebody" has to? What if a mysterious tribe in the Amazon rainforest turn out to be the most boring people on earth? What if the afterlife is nothing more than a London suburb, where the dead get new flats, new jobs, and their own telephone directory? These are the sort of truths that emerge in this collection of stories by one of England's most gifted writers.
In "The Quantity Theory of Insanity," Will Self tips over the banal surfaces of everyday existence to uncover the hideous,...

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, "Ulysses"
1918
Audrey Deathfeminist, socialist and munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenalfalls ill with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic rages across Europe, killing a third of its victims and condemning a further third to living death.
1971
Under the curious eyes of psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, assumed mental patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a spring grotto that she has made every one of the forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental Hospital.
2010
Now retired, Dr. Busner travels...