An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Biography & Memoirs)

"Good copy: Will isn't short on it."--Christian Lorentzen, Airmail

"Will looks back to Self's adolescence and early 20s, when he was strung out on smack, and presents himself as a wheedling, whining bully who treated his friends, family and lovers with that junkie's inversion of the categorical imperative: seeing others only as a means of achieving his next fix . . . Recalls the great wave of drug memoirs that came in the 1990s, and particularly Ann Marlow's superb, genre-bending How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z . . . The book is a joy to read, with the final part in particular recalling David Foster Wallace at his best . . .There's more than mere nostalgic pleasure in this gleefully self-lacerating memoir of drug abuse and rehab."--Guardian

"Harrowing--and, occasionally, humorous . . . Much to his credit, Self shows us everything (emphasis on every), thus defusing any chance of readers romanticizing his buying-and-selling days as an extended hedonistic vacation . . . Readers of William S. Burroughs and Beat literature, as well as experiential journals from Djuna Barnes, Paul Bowles, and Hunter S. Thompson will find here much to endure and enjoy."--Library Journal (starred review)

"A painfully honest exploration of the nightmare of addiction . . . A keen, remarkably unsparing observer of his disastrous early adulthood . . . His manic style evokes both Hunter S. Thompson and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange."--Book Reporter

"One of Britain's most inspired writers employs his novelist style to a chronicle of his addictions . . . A third-person, no-holds-barred tale of [Self's] fascinating life . . . His readers won't be surprised by this heady stew of J.G. Ballard, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick . . . The prose is consistently spectacular . . . A tale of addiction and consequences by the singular Self earns its shock and awe."--Kirkus Reviews

"[Self's] memoir finds recovery in the form of friendships and the miracle that he somehow found the resolve to survive."--Booklist

Praise for Will Self

"Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers."--New York

"Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel."--Guardian

"Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it's as if he is the first person to see anything at all."--New York Times

"Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . . . The reward is a strange, vivid book."--New Yorker

"Self's prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole."--Independent

"Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self's unrestricted writing . . . You'll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled--and laugh your ass off."--NPR

"Will Self's Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief."--New Statesman

"[Phone] delivers a hurricane of satire and suspense . . . A novel of grand ideas, powered by a ravenous curiosity about the role of the technological revolution in our private and public woes . . . William S. Burroughs, meet John le Carré."--Financial Times

"Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . . . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion."--New York Review of Books