Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe
Encyclopedia
Overview
"Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe" is the sixth collection of short stories by Will SelfWill Self
William Woodard "Will" Self is an English novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time...
.
The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper said of the collection...
"Like most of Self's work, these stories detail a massive loss, a misplacement, of humanity. In some sense they are actually about being a satirist, about being able to have so removed a point of view that you might as well be looking down from orbit."
However The Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
review gave a harsher appraisal...
"Will Self is going through a bad patch. I thought Dorian, his last novel, was pretty dire, but this new collection of stories is even worse. They are not funny, they are not clever, they are just a mess. Perhaps one day he will recover the form which made the outrageous Cock and Bull and, in a more sombre vein, How the Dead Live, so readable; but for the moment, he is floundering."
Dr Mukti
Dr. Shiva Mukti is an overworked psychiatric doctor working in London. He feels dissatisfied. After an encounter with Dr Zack BusnerZack Busner
Zack Busner is a recurring character in the fiction of Will Self, appearing in the short story collections The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Grey Area, Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, and in the novels Great Apes and The Book of Dave....
the two begin trading patients of interest. However it soon becomes clear that despite Busner's failing health he is determined to exact his calculated revenge upon Dr. Mukti.
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A young boy on the run from a local gang slips into the flat of an old man whose sight is failing. Hiding there he comes to exist in symbiosis with the old man and sees the world as he does from high above Liverpool.The Five-swing Walk
A weekend dad considers the dull drudgery of his life as he wanders from park to park with his offspring and wonders whether he could effectively fake his own suicide to escape the machinations of the Child Support AgencyChild Support Agency
The Child Support Agency is a delivery arm of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission in Great Britain and the Department for Social Development in Northern Ireland...
.
Conversations with Ord
Two men indulge in a conversation pretending to be people that they aren't.Return to the Planet of the Humans
A return to the world first established in Self's prior novel Great ApesGreat Apes (novel)
-Plot synopsis:After a night of drug use, Simon Dykes wakes up in a world where chimpanzees have evolved to be the dominant species with self-awareness, while humans are the equivalent of chimps in our world.-Reviews:...
and its protagonist, Simon Dykes.