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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.
"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
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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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