Junk Mail (Uncorrected Proof)

Will Self is one of the most important British novelists of his generation, and he is as acclaimed in the UK for his outstanding, daring journalism as he is for his fiction. Now finally available in America, Junk Mail is an original selection of pieces from Self's nonfiction and journalism that will introduce American readers to Self as a literary journalist par excellence.

Animated by the scathing brilliance and unflinching determination to walk the road less traveled, Junk Mail is an often irreverent trawl through a landscape of drugs, culture, art, literature, and current events — topics Self illuminates with a keen and entirely original eye. We follow Self into the operation of an upstanding crack dealer, behind the myth of the "pragmatist" approach to drug legalization on the streets of Amsterdam, and to lunch with Indian author Salman Rushdie. Whether he is writing about bad boy British artist Damien Hirst, how literary renegade William Burroughs has changed our outlook on art and intoxication, or what the current state of transsexuality has to say about gender for all of us, this is a lively and necessary anthology from one of the defining voices of our times.

Having produced illustrative cartoons for the "New Statesman" in the early 1980s, Will Self went on to publish spot cartoons for many different journals. The best of these are reproduced in this volume together with features and critical articles written for others. The material is mostly concerned with the politics, culture and ritual of intoxication. From Cryonicists in LA to narcs in Amsterdam, Self examines examples of weirdness. He is the author of "The Quantity Theory of Insanity", shortlisted for the 1992 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and winner of the 1993 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and of "Cock & Bull", "My Idea of Fun" and "Grey Area".