Visiting Mrs. Nabokov

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307777790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
A tantalizing collection of classic essays from one of the most gifted writers of his generation. • "The brainy, sarcastic, tender intelligence at the center of these pieces can make you laugh out loud: they can also move you to tears." —People Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London's darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw. Throughout, he offers razor-sharp takes on such subjects as: American politics: "If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily dreamless: eight years of Do Not Disturb." Chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical.... My chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a type writer producing King Lear." "His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity." —John Updike

The War Against Cliche

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101910259
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection, Martin Amis, "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME), takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton, and more. "[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache.... Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading but also to a fascination with individual writers." —The New York Times Here, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. Above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches—not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.

Vintage Amis

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
A perfect introduction to one of the world’s greatest modern writers who is equally at home in satirical novels and biting critical essays, wickedly funny short stories and intimate autobiography. “Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels.”—The Seattle Times Martin Amis is widely regarded as one of the most influential yet inimitable voices in contemporary fiction, a writer whose prose captures the warp-speed rush of modernity. Vintage Amis displays this versatility in an excerpt from the author’s award-winning memoir, Experience; the “Horrorday” chapter from London Fields; a vignette from his novel Money; the stories “State of England,” “Insight at Flam Lake,” and “Coincidence of the Arts”; and the essays “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov,” “Phantom of the Opera.” Also included, for the first time in book form, the short story “Porno’s Last Summer.”

Vladimir Nabokov in Context

Author: David Bethea
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108676170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature.

House of Meetings

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030726730X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel set in 1946, starring two brothers and a Jewish girl who fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (Time). “A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.” —The New York Times The brothers' fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.

Heavy Water

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307787397
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
A wickedly delightful collection of stories establishing Amis as one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation. "Martin Amis is a force unto himself.... There is, quite simply, no one else like him."—The Washington Post "Martin Amis is a stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight." —The Wall Street Journal Martin Amis once again demonstrates why he is a modern master of the short story form. In "Career Move," screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In "Straight Fiction," the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire—the opposite sex. And in "State of England," Mal, a former "minder to the superstars," discovers how to live in a country where "class and race and gender were supposedly gone."

Other People

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307497186
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
"One of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME) gives us a metaphysical literary mystery that is as ambitious as it is intriguing, an investigation of a young woman's violent extinction that also traces her construction of a new and oddly innocent self. She wakes in an emergency room in a London hospital, to a voice that tells her: "You're on your own now. Take care. Be good." She has no knowledge of her name, her past, or even her species. It takes her a while to realize that she is human—and that the beings who threaten, befriend, and violate her are other people. Some of whom seem to know all about her. "Powerful and electrifying.... Other People is a metaphysical thriller, Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho." —J. G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun

The Rub of Time

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446401553
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction – his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis’s heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump’s rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.

The Information

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446401820
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
Once close friends, writers Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull now find themselves in fierce competition. While Tull has spiralled into a mire of literary obscurity and belletristic odd jobs, Barry’s atrocious attempts at novels have brought him untold success. Prizes, prestige and wealth abound, and from far below Tull can only watch, stewing in torment. Until, that is, resentment turns to revenge. Consumed by the question of how one writer can really hurt another, Tull’s quest for an answer will unleash increasingly violent urges on both writers’ lives. ‘A funny, vicious portrait of literary London’ Evening Standard

The Rub of Time

Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0735273790
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Book Description
The definitive collection of essays and reportage written during the past thirty years from one of most provocative and widely read writers--with new commentary by the author. For more than thirty years, Martin Amis has turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics--politics, sports, celebrity, America, and, of course, literature. Now, at last, these incomparable essays have been gathered together. Here is Amis at the 2011 GOP Iowa Caucus, where, squeezed between "windbreakers and woolly hats," he pores over The Ron Paul Family Cookbook and laments the absence of "our Banquo," Herman Cain. He writes about finally confronting the effects of aging on his athletic prowess. He revisits, time and time again, the worlds of Bellow and Nabokov, his "twin peaks," masters who have obsessed and inspired him. Brilliant, incisive, and savagely funny, The Rub of Time is a vital addition to any Amis fan's bookshelf, and the perfect primer for readers discovering his fierce and tremendous talents for the first time.