Bringing the same imagination and humor to his essays that he does to fiction, Will Self offers a cornucopia of texts on writing and literature. Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, and from the Australian outback to literary forms past and future. Also included is commentary on Woolf, Kafka, Orwell, Conrad, and Sebald, while he describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs's Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic.