Why Read

''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

From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed ''the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation'' by the Guardian, Will Self''s Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.

Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald''s childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs''s Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in L