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  • Published: 7 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141928647
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Liver

A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes




A breathtaking and unsettling collection of shorter fiction from the 'English prose laureate of dispute and disorientation' London Review of Books

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's 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.

  • Published: 7 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141928647
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Will Self

Will Self is the author of three short-story collections, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (winner of the 1992 Geoffrey Faber award), Grey Area and Tough Tough Toys for Touch Tough Boys; a dyad of novellas, Cock and Bull, and a third novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; and four novels, My Idea of Fun, Great Apes, How the Dead Live (shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2000) and The Book of Dave.

Together with the photographer David Gamble, he produced Perfidious Man, a sideways look at contemporary masculinity. There have been three collections of journalism, Junk Mail, Sore Sites and Feeding Frenzy. Will Self has written for a plethora of publications over the years and is a regular broadcaster on television and radio. His latest work is a collection of pieces entitled Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes.

Also by Will Self

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Praise for Liver

Praise for The Book of Dave: 'Self is...a master of demotic speech and -- rare breed this side of the Channel -- a novelist of ideas' Sunday Telegraph 'Epic and bitterly funny, this new stew of satire and linguistic wizardry is everything you'd expect from Britain's master of misanthropy' Arena 'Self has upped his ante from Monty Python to Jonathan Swift, and gone straight to brilliant hell' Harper's