Will Self (b. 1961) is one of the brightest modern English prose writers, “a master of outrageousness and a caustic mocker with extraordinary flights of fancy.” Critics find in his work the influence of such dissimilar authors as Victor Pelevin, Franz Kafka, William S. Burroughs, Martin Amis. How the Dead Live is Self's masterpiece. Sixty-five-year-old Lily Bloom, a woman with a quarrelsome character and a sharp tongue, who lived half her life in America, dies in London. The Australian aborigine Phar Lap becomes her guide in the afterlife. After her death, Lily settles in Dalston, a ghostly suburb of London where the dead live. Her closest circle turns out to be an embryo obsessed with pop music, a nine-year-old dirty son who died long ago under the wheels of a car, and Fats - three ugly creatures who embodied the weight she lost during her life. But earthly existence continues to beckon Lily, and a completely unexpected way out is found... Self’s wild fantasy unfolds in full force in the description of Lily’s imaginary and real movements, alternating grotesque and touching pictures of the earthly world and the world of the dead.