Morrissey - Sing Your Life on MUZU.TV.
Morrissey's much-anticipated life story Autobiography has rocketed to No 1 in the Amazon.co.uk bestseller charts after it was officially released last night, leapfrogging David Walliams' Demon Dentist, Eleanor Catton's Man Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
A queue has been building since 4pm yesterday outside the Akademibokhandeln Nordstan bookshop in Gothenburg, Sweden, where the singer-songwriter will be appearing for a book signing at 5pm local time today.
Details on the bookshop's website stipulate that photography is OK, "but no close-ups allowed", and that Morrissey will only sign copies of his book, "not guitars, loose papers or similar".
In the UK, the Big Green Bookshop in north London held a midnight opening and began selling the book at 00:01 this morning, and UK high street bookselling chain Waterstones reported that "half the people in head office have already bought a copy. It is flying out this morning. It is very much a book that we should do fantastically well with. We'd love to have events with him – time will tell if we do. We're ready for him!," a spokesman said.
Reactions on Twitter to the book, released as a Penguin Classic paperback and as an ebook after weeks of speculation, were irreverent.
Comic novelist @jennycolgan tweeted a picture of the book's first page, with the comment "OMINOUS".
Opening page of the Morrissey book. OMINOUS. RT @jackseale pic.twitter.com/Xh7Ei1oRyl
— Jenny Colgan (@jennycolgan) October 17, 2013
Earlier, Times' columnist Caitlin Moran @caitlinmoran, had suggested a title for the book: "Very much hope that @simon_price01's title for the Morrissey autobiography – "Mein Booky-Wook" – catches on."
Very much hope that @simon_price01's title for the Morrissey autobiography - "Mein Booky-Wook" - catches on.
— Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) October 15, 2013
In anticipation of the book's literary qualities, Buzzfeed alluded to Morrissey's broad reading habits, with a list of his finest literary moments: in response to a question from LA Weekly in 2007, "I love Jane Austen. She's a genius. Do you agree?", Morrissey replied "Oh, good grief, yes."
