Dorian (Ay Adult - Self) - Hardcover

Self, Will

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802117295 ISBN 13: 9780802117298

Publisher: Grove Press, 2002

Synopsis

A contemporary retelling of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic finds Henry Wotton at the center of a clique that includes his friend, Hallward, and the beautiful young Dorian.

About this title

Review:

'Self's Dorian subtitles itself "an imitation", and that is exactly what it is, in the full Wildean sense. It flatters its original by taking both subject and style entirely seriously. The locations, characters, plot and epigrams are all transposed from the 1890s to the 1990s... Little is materially altered, but everything is reused - sharpened, blackened and intensified by Self's idiosyncratic remix of Wilde's combination of wit and rage, extravagant debauchery with clinical introspection...Self's reincarnation of Dorian has taken the fag ends of both an English century and an English myth and given them new, troubling and hugely entertaining life' Guardian

From the Back Cover:

'Chilling, hysterical, tasteless and haunting. A Gothic thriller complementing and enriching its original' Independent on Sunday

'Shot through with dark humour and pathos' Big Issue

In the summer of 1981, aristocratic, drug-addicted Henry Wooten and Warhol-acolyte Baz Hallward meet Dorian Gray. Dorian is a golden adonis - perfect, pure and (so far) deliciously uncorrupted. The subject of Baz's video installation, Cathode Narcissus, and the object of Henry's attentions, Dorian is launched on a hedonistic binge that spans the '80s and '90s. But as Baz and Henry succumb to the disease du jour, how is it that Dorian, despite all his sexual and narcotic debauchery, remains so unsullied - so vibrantly alive?

'Self's reincarnation of Dorian has taken the fag ends of both an English century and an English myth and given them new, troubling and hugely entertaining life' Neil Bartlett, Guardian

'A book that filled its first reviewers with "the odour of moral and spiritual putrefaction" just got smellier, darker and funnier' Observer

'Savage and hilarious [with a] delicious sense of dread. Wilde would have been flattered by Self's brilliant "imitation" of his tainted love story' Time Out

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0802117295
• ISBN 13: 9780802117298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288