Will Self and the Essays That Are Travelogues That Are Columns That Are Fiction That Are Chronicles

Will Self is another fiction writer who has been increasingly drawn to the chronicle form. His "Walking to Hollywood" was picked as a "paperback of the year" by the Independent of London. Of course, the paper did not call it a chronicle. What did the paper call it instead? Lacking the mot juste, it obviously couldn't decide, writing: "The three essays collected in Walking to Hollywood are non-fictional travelogues that spiral slowly into abstraction, similar in many ways to the 'psychogeography' columns on which Will Self collaborated with Ralph Steadman." 

But even more confused is the book's American publisher, Grove Press, who calls it "a new and stunning work of fiction" in which "a British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through L.A. freeways." Astounding, American publishers' inability to believe that the reading public can cope with the notion of nonfiction that is written in a literary manner.