About the Book
Will Self possesses one of the greatest literary imaginations of any writer working today. How the Dead Live is his most extraordinary book yet-a novel that will challenge, entertain, and truly astonish.
Lily Bloom is an aging American transplanted to England who has lost her battle with cancer and lies wasting away at the Royal Ear Hospital. As her two daughters--lumpy Charlotte, who runs a hugely successful chain of stationery stores called Waste of Paper, and beautiful Natasha, a junkie--buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily slides in and out of the present, taking us on a surreal, opinionated trip through the stages of a lifetime of lust and rage. A career girl in the 1940s, a sexed-up, tippling adulteress in the 1950s and '60s, a divorced PR flak in the 1970s and '80s, Lily presents us with a portrait of America and England over sixty years of riotous and unreal change.
And then it's over: Lily catches a cab with the aboriginal wizard Phar Lap Jones, her guide to the shockingly banal world of the dead. It's a world that is surreal but familiar, where she again works in PR and rediscovers how great smoking is, where her cohabitants include Rude Boy, the son who died at age nine and now swears a blue streak, and three eyeless, murmuring wraiths, the Fats--composed of the pounds, literally the whole selves, she lost and gained over her lifetime. As Lily settles into her nonexistence, the most difficult challenge for this staunchly difficult woman is how to understand that she's dead, and how to leave the rest behind.
How the Dead Live is an unforgettable portrait of the human condition, the struggle with life and with death. It's a novel that will disturb and provoke, the work, in the words of one British reviewer, "of a novelist writing at the height of his powers."
About the Author :
Will Self is also the author of The Quantity Theory of Insanity; My Idea of Fun; Cock & Bull; Grey Area; The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys; and Great Apes.
Review :
"Utterly irresistible. [Self's] nervy, irreverent, exhilarating prose-incorporating street slang, pop culture, and a manic wit--rips along with the take-no-prisoners power of a young Bellows or Roth." --Dan Cryer, Newsday
"One of the most ingeniously creative, hallucinogenic books to come along in a long time." --Thomas J. Brady, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"If authors are guides to the unknown . . . then Self, with all his several coats of humor and irony and cleverness, is the Beatrice you want for your trip to the underworld." --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"How the Dead Live overflows with rhetorical ecstasy--arabesques of assonance and alliteration, puns peppering every paragraph, chiasmus turning clause after clause back on themselves like a hall of mirrors, page upon page enacting a giant oxymoron: loathing as glee." --Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle
"Combine Katherine Anne Porter's Granny Weatherall with Jonathan Swift's satiric take on humanity, and you still won't approach what's going on in Will Self's latest book." --Judy Budz, New York Daily News
"There must be a special place in hell for writers like Will Self. Some kind of Faustian literary pact seems the only way to account for nine rabidly original books in as many years. . . . Exuberant and fast-moving . . . By imagining the lives of the dead, Self is of course asking hard questions about how and why we live." --Zsuzsi Gartner, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
"Scathingly satiric and prophetic . . . Self's novel will surely figure on best-book lists this year." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[How the Dead Live] may even be [Self's] best work yet. What's even more encouraging for admirers of Self's work is that it gets better as it goes along." --Chris Wright, The Boston Phoenix
"[Lily Bloom] is an angrier, testier cousin to Daisy Goodwill, Carol Shields' good-natured Everywoman in The Stone Diaries. . . . Will Self's literary magic makes Lily Bloom, a plant destined to shrivel rather than flourish, entirely unforgettable. Out of her long, mournful dying, her strange and tormented life and stranger afterlife, he has fashioned the most poignant, gut-wrenching art." --Dan Cryer, Newsday
"The irreverent Self's deft use of parody compels us to reexamine our attitudes towards life's last gasps." --Time Out New York
"[A] blistering critique of our excesses at the end of the twentieth century." --David Farkas, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
"How the Dead Live is the work of a novelist at the height of his powers. It is a horror story, a love-me-do story, a full-frontal assault on the seven deadly sins--and a celebration of them. . . . [Self's] verbal fireworks are fueled by real anger and grief. Life may be grotty but he has proved that literature can still be great." --Mark Sanderson, The Evening Standard (London)
"Superbly morbid . . . How the Dead Live is gloriously the work of a 'demented moralist' to borrow Lily Bloom's suggestive phrase. But it seems to make the transition for Self from the anarchic visions of Hunter Thompson to the sober judgements of Dean Swift." --Matt Seaton, Esquire UK
"Here is a long work of fiction to rank alongside the short story collections and novellas produced in a prolific period of creativity since [Self's] prize-winning debut in 1991. Here, too, is a long-awaited evidence of a compassionate underbelly to the shell of Self's intellectual and imaginative virtuosity. For the first time I felt myself moved by his writing." --Martyn Bedford, Literary Review
