The Quantity Theory of Insanity

What if there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to? What if a mysterious tribe in the Amazon rainforest turn out to be the most boring people on the earth? What if the afterlife is nothing more than a London suburb, where the dead get new flats, new jobs, and their own telephone directory? These are the sort of truths that emerge in this collection of stories by one of England's most gifted writers.

In The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self tips over the banal surfaces of everyday existence to uncover the hideous, the hilarious, and the bizarre. Psychiatry, anthropology, theology--and literature--will never be the same."If a manic J.G. Ballard and a depressed David Lodge got together, they might produce something like The Quantity Theory of Insanity. But Will Self's world is all his own; it is both exotic and institutionalized, full of dread and dowdiness and entirely unsuspected comedy." --Martin Amis

"The outright excellence of this book cannot be denied. The Quantity Theory of Insanity is of such high caliber that it could strike a new literary rivalry between the U.K. and the United States." --Los Angeles ReaderWill Self grew up in London, where he lives with his wife and two children. The Quantity Theory of Insanity won the 1993 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1992 John llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is also the author of Cock & Bull and My Idea of Fun.