Walking to Hollywood is a dazzling triptych — obsessive, satirical, elegiac — in which Will Self burrows down through the intersections of time, place and psyche to explore some of our deepest fears and anxieties with characteristic fearlessness and jagged humour. 'Very Little' is ostensibly the account of a curative journey to Canada and the USA, but in fact the record of a nematode's progress, as the worm of obsession — with scale and packing and the 'stuff' of our lives — bores through a mind in extremesis. 'Walking to Hollywood' is an extreme satire on celebrity, in which the narrator believes that everyone he meets is played by a famous actor, and that only he can solve the mystery of who murdered the movies. 'Spurn Head' leads Self to a tormented sojourn with a madman whose house is sliding over the edge of a cliff, to a game of checkers with Death, and finally to an encounter with one of Swift's immortal Struldbruggs and a march through a tear in time itself. In Walking to Hollywood Will Self pushes memoir to the limits of invention.

«'As good as anything he has written... one of Self's grisliest creations. There is no contemporary writer of fiction more perceptive about psychosis' — «Financial Times». 'Self's enjoyable, intelligent collection of savage stories is splendidly satiric. The title story is a brilliant novella that tells of dueling psychiatrists who use mental patients as weapons. You laugh, but you also flinch' — «Scotsman». 'A destabilizing, funny, abundantly Gothic tour de force' — «Guardian».»

A portrayal of egos, appetites and addictions. It presents an examination of lives out of control and beyond saving by the pre-eminent chronicler of our neuroses and our times.

When the young Ian Wharton first meets Mr Broadhurst, he is completely unaware of the influence he will come to exert over his life as 'The Fat Controller' — a constant companion and confidant and also the obese, erudite manifestation of Ian' s mental illness. As Ian's idea of fun becomes increasingly extreme, the reader is taken to a place where morality is eroded by the dull grind of modernity and everything becomes admissable.

«The fictional world of Will Self is unlike any other. In «The Quantity Theory of Insanity» we learn, amongst other things, the dark and terrible secret of Ward 9, why you are right to think that London is full of dead people and that each and every human being is caught up in a colossal balancing act between the sane and the insane. «The Quantity Theory of Insanity» is acerbic, satirical, hilarious and, most of all, utterly unique in imaginative vision.»