Walking to Hollywood was published by Bloomsbury in 2010. It consists of three interconnected novellas in which a character called “Will Self” — who may or may not be the actual author — undertakes journeys that are simultaneously physical and psychological.
In the first novella, Self walks from central London to Hollywood (not metaphorically — he flies to LAX and then walks across the sprawling, pedestrian-hostile city on foot). The walk becomes a meditation on the relationship between the body, the built environment, and the cinematic imagination that has shaped how we see Los Angeles. In the second, Self investigates the “murder” of the scale model — the physical architectural model, killed by CGI — as if it were a detective story, visiting model-makers and architects and treating the death of a craft as a genuine homicide. In the third, Self’s own identity begins to fragment as the boundaries between his fictional and actual selves dissolve.
The book extends Self’s long engagement with psychogeography — the practice of walking as a way of reading urban landscapes — into new territory. The prose is Self at his most fluid: essayistic, digressive, intellectually playful, moving between registers of travel writing, literary criticism, autobiography, and speculative fiction with a freedom that makes genre classification pointless.
Collecting Walking to Hollywood
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 2010): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20