The Quantity Theory of Morality

by Will Self

Overview

“Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation.”—Guardian

A blistering collection of dark, witty short stories by the Booker-shortlisted author, his first collection in two decades

In Will Self’s first collection since his Geoffrey Faber Memorial award-winning The Quantity Theory of Insanity, his pen remains as dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. The targets for his savage barbs have grown in both number and extent, including the hypocrisies of organized religion, the sacred cows of liberal humanism, and all that is absurd about modern life. With recurring—if defeated—appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, Self’s conceits grow ever more wildly imaginative, and they echo with laughter at once raucously abandoned and painfully hollow.

Since the release of his first collection, Will Self has been hailed as a master of the short story.The Quantity Theory of Morality is his long-awaited return to form. Self skewers and scissors through modern mores and virtues in a bookend to his first collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, which Martin Amis likened to a cross between “a manic J. G. Ballard and a depressed David Lodge,” although, as ever, “Will Self’s world is all his own.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802166302
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/10/2026
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook

About the Author

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including most recently Elaine, from Grove Press in 2024; Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London. will-self.com

Editorial Reviews

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 Magazine

“Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel.”—Guardian

“Mr. Self often enough writes with such vividness it’s as if he is the first person to see anything at all.”—New York Times

“Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives . . . The reward is a strange, vivid book.”—New Yorker

“Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.”—Independent

“Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self’s unrestricted writing . . . You’ll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled—and laugh your ass off.”—NPR

“Will Self’s Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief.”—New Statesman

“Self has indeed been a goat among the sheep of contemporary English fiction, a puckish trickster self-consciously at odds with its middle-class politeness . . . Writers, too, as Self so wonderfully proves, can awaken the half-dead and reanimate that which has been sunk in oblivion.”—New York Review of Books

From the Publisher