Those familiar with the work of author Will Self know he’s not one generally given to understatement — he did, after all, once write a book called A Rock of Crack As Big As the Ritz. So it comes as a surprise when, speaking from his home in London, the author responds to a comment about his being prolific with a demure, " I suppose I am, a bit. "

Self is one of those writers who afflict the rest of us in the game with what might be termed output envy. And his writing is as ambitious as it is abundant. His novel How the Dead Live (Grove Press, 2000) combined themes of anti-Semitism, urban dissolution, and Tibetan theology. His latest — Dorian: An Imitation (Grove, 2002) — reworks Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, setting the story amid the sexual and narcotic excesses of the 1980s and using it to explore the ravages of AIDS, postmodern art, and even the iconography surrounding Princess Diana — all the while displaying his talent for pyrotechnic prose and dark wit.

As well as publishing fiction at a very tidy rate, Self has somehow found the time to try his hand at being a food reviewer, a cultural critic, a cartoonist, a columnist, a profile writer, a political commentator, a TV and radio personality, and an occasional dabbler in the avant-garde arts. How does he do it?

" Well, I’m slowing up, " he says. " I am doing other things, but not with the fervor I was in the past. I’m 41 in September. I’ve got four children. I have to decide whether I ever want to see them. " He adds that, having just finished up a documentary on the arms trade, he’s preparing to interview the lead singer of Radiohead, as well as doing his weekly column for London’s Evening Standard and appearing regularly on a TV game show. Oh, and working on both a new novel and a book of short stories.

Of course, prolificacy doesn’t always add up to popularity — especially when you deal in the kind of grim subject matter that Self favors. " I understand that some people really loved the book, and some people really hated it, " he says, referring to Dorian. Unfortunately, one of the people who really hated the book was Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times’ heavy-hitter critic, who called it " a clumsy, unwitty rip-off. "

" I couldn’t give a fuck what Michiko Kakutani thinks, " Self says, sounding more like himself. " I’m not taking some kind of master class; she’s not going to teach me how to write a good book. I’m not writing books to achieve consensus. I want to get at some profound truths. I want to say things that are unpalatable. So I’d be disappointed if there weren’t some really shitty reviews. I hope the book does upset people. It would be awful if it didn’t. "

Self has certainly never had any trouble upsetting people. He recalls being accosted recently by a woman who said she didn’t believe that the types of characters portrayed in Dorian exist. " I said, ‘Oh, just how many upper-class homosexual drug addicts did you hang out with?’ This is the milieu I lived in. I hybridized Wilde’s characters with people I knew. So even though I’m a ludicrously comfortable bourgeois who takes nothing more intoxicating than a cup of tea, I spent a lot of my life in this world, and it’s still at my fingertips. "

Once England’s most famous junkie, Self has spent the last few years cleaning up. But, as Dorian illustrates, his work is as deliciously nasty as ever. Then again, Self isn’t completely clean. " I fell off the tobacco wagon, " he says. " In December, my wife said to me, ‘You can die of sanctimoniousness as easily as you can of cancer.’ So I had a cigarette. I don’t want to die of sanctimony. "