When artist Simon Dykes wakes after a late night of routine debauchery, he discovers that his world has changed beyond recognition. His girlfriend, Sarah, has turned into a chimpanzee. And, to Simon's appalled surprise, so has the rest of humanity. Simon, under the bizarre delusion that he is 'human', is confined to an emergency psychiatric ward. There he becomes of considerable interest to eminent psychologist and chimp, Dr Zack Busner. For with this fascinating case, Busner thinks may finally make his reputation as a truly great ape.

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys is a new collection of corkscrewed tales from the author of Great Apes. Self's world is a no-funhouse of warped mirrors. A man is seduced into a misanthropically charged symbiosis with the insects infesting his cottage - he has entered "Flytopia." In "A Story for Europe," a two-year-old English child utters his first, halting words . . . in business German. In "Caring, Sharing," status-conscious New Yorkers navigate the perils of dating along with their very literal "inner children." In "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz," a black Londoner discovers an enormous rock of crack cocaine underpinning his house - and quickly turns it into an efficient little empire. In the title story a psychoanalyst strips away all the sangfroid of his professionalism to find beneath . . . precisely nothing. And in the short novella "The Nonce Prize," a man framed for a sex crime he didn't commit finds that his only way out is to win a short-story competition.

British satirist Will Self spins four interconnected stories into a brilliantly insightful commentary on human foibles and resilience. Will Self’s remarkable new stories center on the disease and decay that target the largest of human organs: the liver. Set in locales as toxic as a London drinking club and mundane as a clinic in an ultraorderly Swiss city, the stories distill the hard lives of their subjects whether alcoholic, drug addict, or cancer patient. I n “Fois Humane,” set at the Plantation Club, it’s always a Tuesday afternoon in midwinter, and the shivering denizens of this dusty realm spend their days observing its proprietor as he force-feeds the barman vodkaspiked beer. Joyce Beddoes, protagonist of “Leberknödel,” has terminal liver cancer and is on her way to be euthanized in Zurich when, miraculously, her disease goes into remission. In “Prometheus” a young copywriter at London’s most cutting edge ad agency has his liver nibbled by a griffon thrice daily, but he’s always in the pink the following morning and ready to make that killer pitch. If blood and bile flow through liverish London, the two arteries meet in “Birdy Num Num,” where “career junky” Billy Chobham performs little services for the customers who gather to wait for the Man, while in his blood a virus pullulates. A moving portrayal of egos, appetites and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary achievement.

Will Self, the man who the Telegraph claims "could write his way out of a nuclear attack," is surely one of the most original and highly acclaimed writers to appear on the scene in the last decade. From Kafka to Cronenberg, Monty Python to Gore Vidal, the range of seemingly incongruous comparisons that have been made about Self serve as testimony to the literary establishment's grappling with what is a truly unique, wonderfully outrageous vision. My Idea of Fun is his long-awaited, extraordinary first novel. The story of a devilishly clever international financier/marketing wizard and his young apprentice, My Idea of Fun is both a frighteningly dark subterranean exploration of capitalism run rampant and a wickedly sharp, technically acute display of linguistic pyrotechnics that glows with pure white-hot brilliance. Ian Wharton is a very ordinary young man until he is taken under the wing of a gentleman known variously as Mr. Broadhurst, Samuel Northcliff, and finally and conclusively simply as the Fat Controller. Loud-mouthed, impeccably tailored, a fount of bombastic erudition, the Fat Controller initiates Ian into the dark secrets of his arts - of marketing, money, and the human psyche - and takes Ian, and the reader, on a wild voyage around the edges of reality. As we careen into the twenty-first century, Self perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our times: money is the only common language; consumerism, violence, and psychosis (drug-induced and otherwise) prevail; and the human soul has become the ultimate product. The object of frenetic attention in Britain, where it has been both lauded and attacked, My Idea of Fun is, as one critic said, a "novel in sparkling inventive prose, that crackles with hell-fire." "High-energy, high-caloric prose. . . a wonderfully rich and wicked novel" ( The New York Times Book Review). Will Self's first novel, about a man selling his soul to the devil, is violent, hilarious, outrageous, and, above all, completely original.

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, UlyssesRecently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden - maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences.Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which brother is it who remains alive?Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.

"Self's Dorian subtitles itself "an imitation", and that it is exactly what it is, in the full Wildean sense. It flatters its original by taking both subject and style entirely seriously. The locations, characters, plot and epigrams are all transposed from the 1890s to the 1990s... Little is materially altered, but everything is reused - sharpened, blackened and intensified by Self's idiosyncratic remix of Wilde's combination of wit and rage, extravagant debauchery with clinical introspection...Self's reincarnation of Dorian has taken the fag ends of both an English century and an English myth and given them new, troubling and hugely entertaining life." Guardian

When East End cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife takes from him his only son, Dave pens a gripping text-a compilation about everything from the environment, Arabs, and American tourists to sex, Prozac, and cabby lore-that captures all of his frustrations and anxieties about his contemporary world. Dave buries the book in his ex-wife's Hampstead backyard, intending it for his son, Carl, when he comes of age. Five hundred years later, Dave's book is found by the inhabitants of Ham, a primitive archipelago in postapocalyptic London, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportions and the template for a new civilization. Only one islander, Symum, remains incredulous. But, after he is imprisoned for heresy, his son Carl must journey through the Forbidden Zone and into the terrifying heart of New London to find the only thing that will reveal the truth once and for all: a second Book of Dave that repudiates the first. The Book of Dave is a profound meditation upon the nature of...

Published to rave reviews in the United Kingdom, Phone tells the story of two men: Zack Busner and Jonathan De'Ath. Busner is a psychiatrist who has made his name through his unorthodox treatment of psychological damage, such as giving the controversial drug L-DOPA to patients ravaged by encephalitis, or administering LSD to World War II PTSD-sufferers. But now Busner's own mind is fraying: Alzheimer's is shredding his memory and his newest possession is a shiny smartphone given to him by his introverted grandson Ben. Meanwhile, Jonathan De'Ath, aka "the Butcher," is an MI6 man who remains a mystery even to those closest to him, be it his washed-up old university lecturer father, his jumbling-bumbling mother, his hippy-dippy brothers, his spooky colleagues or multitudinous lovers. All of De'Ath's acquaintances apply the "Butcher" epithet to him, and perhaps there is only one person who thinks of him with tenderness, a man he keeps top secret, encrypted in the databanks of...

Since the release of his first story collection in 1991, Will Self has been hailed as a master of the short story. Now, for the first time, selected stories from his five highly praised collections will be available in one volume, introduced by Rick Moody. These stories, drawn from The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Gray Area, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, and Liver—plus one story never before published—give us unexpected comic twists, masterful language, and the ordinary colored by the absurd: a man who finds his mother walking in a London suburb ten months after her death; the odd nuances of a drab office worker's daily routine; and a send-up of the British elite that takes place after a carcinogenic fog blankets England. Compared favorably to Nabokov, Pynchon, Gaddis, Ballard, and DeLillo, Will Self is a bold satirist whose selected stories represent some of the best and most outrageous fiction of the last decade.From BooklistDrawing on selections from Self’s five prior short story collections, this volume presents the writer’s 16 most well known stories as well as a previously unpublished one. Readers should be prepared for the onslaught as the author unleashes the full force of his signature style, a manic, precisely worded, and sometimes shocking assault on all the things Self despises. Like fellow Brit Martin Amis, Self sees too clearly and then proceeds to revel in all that is horrible about modern life. Whether it’s the interminable monologues of the fusty anthropologist who spends years studying a tribe whose most discerning feature is that they are boring, in “Understanding the Ur-Bororo,” or the rise and precipitous fall of the drug-dealing brothers who operate in London’s West End in “The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz” and “The Nonce Prize,” Self never tires of serving up all that is most depressing about human nature, and he does so in language possessed of such ghastly clarity that there is no escape from his diabolical worldview. As Rick Moody warns in the introduction: “Those who come in search of the traditional humanist epiphany are likely to get a kick in the ass for their trouble.” --Joanne Wilkinson Review“The perfect introduction to the gamut of Self’s darkly comic, verbally dexterous shorter prose. Turning outrageously apt metaphors as few others can, Self could build a career on wit alone. As this outstanding collection amply shows, however, he delivers much more.”—Library Journal“A welcome showcase of short (or shortish) fiction by quirky comic master Self.  Each story is a pleasure. A powerful argument against selflessness, a treat for fans and a grand introduction for those new to the author’s curious view of the universe.”—Kirkus (starred review)

One of the most remarkably inventive voices of his generation, author Will Self delivers a new and stunning work of fiction. In Walking to Hollywood, a British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through L.A. freeways and eroding English cliffs, skewering celebrity as he attempts to solve a crime: who killed the movies.When Will reconnects with his childhood friend, the world suddenly seems disproportionate. Sherman Oaks, scarcely three feet tall at forty-five, and his ironically sized sculptures—replicas of his body varying from the gargantuan to the miniscule—spark in Will a flurry of obsessive-compulsive thoughts and a nagging desire to experience the world by foot. Ignoring his therapist and nemesis Zack Busner, Self travels to Hollywood on a mission to discover who—or what—killed the movies. Convinced that everyone from his agent, friends, and bums on the street are portrayed by famous actors, Self goes undercover into the dangerous world...