Books by Martin Amis
More Die of Heartbreak
Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of More Die of Heartbreak, has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described "plant visionary." While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from "bliss to breakdown." Imagining that a settled existence will end his anguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood of new torments. As Kenneth grapples with his own problems involving his unusual lady-friend Treckie, the two men try to figure out why gifted and intelligent people invariably find themselves "knee-deep in the garbage of a personal life."
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More Die of Heartbreak
Kenneth Trachtenberg, narrator of Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow's tenth novel, is a witty, eccentric Russian-literature nut who leaves his native Paris to be near his famous American uncle, Benn Crader. Uncle Benn is a world-class genius in botany but a total duffer when it comes to women. Now his erotic escapades and disastrous marriage are about to lead him and Kenneth into a wonderful romp through America's mind-body dilemma...and into a Bellovian masterpiece of great wisdom and good fun.
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Yellow Dog
by Martin Amis
A brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny as hell novel about a family man who is attacked in a garden and suddenly becomes an anti-husband and anti-father, from "one of the greatest novelists of his generation" (TIME)
“Amis is a stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight.” —The Wall Street Journal
When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury, and personality change. He submits to an alien moral system—one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the “yellow” journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; and the porno tycoon, Cora Susan.
Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed “intrusion” that rivets the world—because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog.
If, in the 21st century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. Yellow Dog is a model of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation.
But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.
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Lionel Asbo: State of England (Vintage International)
by Martin Amis
By turns outrageous and touching, an exuberant Dickensian satire of crime, celebrity, and modern culture from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME)
“One of Amis’s funniest novels.” —The New Yorker
Des Pepperdine is a boy out of place. He lives on the thirty-third floor of a London housing project; while his peers pick fights, Des retreats to the public library. What’s more, Des’s uncle and guardian, Lionel Asbo, is one of the most notorious petty criminals in the city.
Yet Lionel, full of inept devotion to his nephew, dutifully teaches Des the essentials of becoming a man (always carry a knife; pornography is easier than dating; pit bulls should be fed Tabasco sauce). To survive these lessons, Des seeks solace in a covert romantic union that would fill Lionel with rage. But just as Des begins to lead a healthier life, Lionel wins £140 million in the lottery. The money ushers in a public-relations firm for Lionel, along with a cannily ambitious topless model–poet.
Through it all, Lionel remains his vicious, oddly loyal self, and his problems, as well as Des’s, only seem to multiply.
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Heavy Water and Other Stories
by Martin Amis
A wickedly delightful collection of stories establishing Amis as one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation
"Amis applies his comic timing, his perfect pitch and his curatorial eye to some of the burning issues of our time." —The New York Times Book Review
"Martin Amis is a force unto himself.... There is, quite simply, no one else like him."—The Washington Post
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."
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Heavy Water and Other Stories
by Martin Amis
A masterful short story collection in which Martin Amis wields his sharp wit and dark humor to unravel the complexities of desire, loneliness, and mankind’s place in the universe.
Heavy Water is a masterful and haunting collection from Martin Amis, where his signature wit and deep insight into the human condition uncover life’s most unsettling truths. In “Career Move,” Amis turns the literary world on its head, exposing the absurdities of contemporary culture as poets bask in fame while screenwriters struggle for recognition. “Denton’s Death” follows a protagonist awaiting his inevitable assassination, offering a chilling meditation on the fragility of life and the inevitable pull of fate.
In “The Coincidence of the Arts,” an English baronet’s life becomes entwined with a chess hustler and an enigmatic, silent woman, exploring the unpredictable nature of desire and fate’s strange intersections. “The Janitor on Mars” confronts humanity’s deepest anxieties as a robot from Mars reveals a disquieting truth about mankind’s place in the universe.
Through Heavy Water, Amis explores the absurdities of existence with his signature blend of dark humor, intellectual rigor, and moral complexity. Each story invites readers to navigate a world where the strange and the profound coexist, offering a daring reflection on the nature of reality itself.
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Night Train
by Martin Amis, A. L. Snijders, Gordon Osing
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Fusing brilliant wordplay with all the elements of a classic whodunit, "Amis has created a quicksilver narrative that grabs the reader and refuse to let go” (The New York Times).
"Dazzling.... Whistles into the police-procedural structure only to blow it to bits." —Wall Street Journal
Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case—this case—has gotten under her skin.
When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop—now top brass—takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Detective Mike Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to "put the case down." Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look.
Not since his celebrated novel Money has Amis turned his focus on America to such remarkable effect. Amis exposes a world where surfaces are suspect (no matter how perfect), where paranoia is justified (no matter how pervasive), and where power and pride are brought low by the hidden recesses of our humanity.
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Night Train
by Martin Amis, A. L. Snijders, Gordon Osing
Brevity is the soul of beauty in these tiny masterworks of short short fiction Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders’s “straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness.”
Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here―humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely―are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but―inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality―might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables.
This morning at 11:30, in the full sun, I go up into the hayloft where I haven’t been for years. I climb over boxes and shelving, and open the door. A frightened owl flies straight at me, dead quiet, as quiet as a shadow can fly, I look into his eyes―he’s a large owl, it’s not strange that I’m frightened too, we frighten each other. I myself thought that owls never move in the daytime. What the owl thinks about me, I don’t know.
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Night Train
by Martin Amis, A. L. Snijders, Gordon Osing
Jake,
Jaime, jambe, jamnes, iacob, jacobus, James, the “leg grabber,” which evolution alludes to incorporation of the law into Faith, which seems not possible unless the OT presides in thought, word and deed, the Gospel is modified and Paul leaves the Levant in a snit. I wouldn’t pull your leg in matters of this importance. We both know Europe’s history of fucking the world for Jesus, Heaven for burial insurance. Ok, no Heart of Darkness is on stage here. “Everybody Knows” the Leonard Cohen song, and Graham Greene’s soldier priest. in The Comedians, putting the kabosh on those who righteously believe in doing nothing.
The Gospel, is either political or merely fabulous, and, as luck has it, my pilgrimage goes on, if often as not it promises not to arrive unless where it began, and Jacob’s ladder finds me both on the way up and down at once, caught in the blandishments of presentation, that simply cannot imagine arrival in eternity. Stay with ladders that traffic in the heart, Yeats proffered. Need can be a lot like love. Besides, “if the people find you can fiddle, then fiddle you must,” says Fiddler Jones, and I learned to see through a rococo screen a form for everything that passed before me. Mum’s the word for everything after that.
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Experience: A Memoir
by Martin Amis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • One of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels.
“Superb memoir...a moving account of [Amis’s] coming of age as an artist and a man.” —San Francisco Chronicle
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others.
Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
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Pornoland
by Martin Amis, Stefano de Luigi
"Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: banish porno, and you banish all of the world." Martin Amis A land where sex is simulated, evoked, glorified, supercharged in the extreme, a land where everything is about the body, in its possible and perverse sexual combinations....This is Pornoland, a strange, parallel universe where pornographic films are churned out on a daily basis. Photographs by Stefano de Luigi and a text by Martin Amis are the guides through this world, filled with actors capable of extraordinary performances (although not the kind that would ever win Oscars), directors who can make an entire film in just one day, improvised sets, almost nonexistent plots, and locations that stay exactly the same from one day to the next. The journey encompasses Milan, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Tokyo, Dortmund, and Los Angeles. It includes no trite moralizing, hasty judgments, or yearnings for redemption. Stefano de Luigi's images and Martin Amis's words use respect, humor, and irony to tell the story of a rarely glimpsed world full of crude colors and harsh brutality, bodily contortions and bursts of laughter, unexpected tenderness and situations on the very edge of the absurd. 54 color illustrations.
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Inside Story: A novel (Vintage International)
by Martin Amis
From one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time, an autobiographical novel that’s a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die
“[A] charismatic compound of fact and fiction...Martin Amis has retained the power to surprise.” —The New York Times
This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books, and where to lunch), Hitch was Amis's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps—an obsession Amis must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness.
Other figures competing as Amis's main influencers are his literary fathers—Kingsley, of course; his hero Saul Bellow; the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin—and his significant literary mothers, including Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Moving among these greats to set his own path, he winds up surveying the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of the 9/11 attacks on the twenty-first—and considers what all of this has taught him about how to live and how to be a writer.
The result is a love letter to life—and to the people in his life—that achieves a new level of confidentiality with his readers, giving us the previously unseen portrait of his extraordinary world.
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Inside Story: A novel
by Martin Amis
An autobiographical novel that’s a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die—from “the Mick Jagger of literature ... Amis is the most dazzling prose stylist in post-war British fiction” (The Daily Telegraph).
“[A] charismatic compound of fact and fiction ... Martin Amis has retained the power to surprise.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books, and where to lunch), Hitch was Amis's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps—an obsession Amis must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness.
Other figures competing as Amis's main influencers are his literary fathers—Kingsley, of course; his hero Saul Bellow; the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin—and his significant literary mothers, including Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Moving among these greats to set his own path, he winds up surveying the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of the 9/11 attacks on the twenty-first—and considers what all of this has taught him about how to live and how to be a writer.
The result is a love letter to life—and to the people in his life—that achieves a new level of confidentiality with his readers, giving us the previously unseen portrait of his extraordinary world.
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London Fields
by Martin Amis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinction—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME).
“Lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." —The New York Times
First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself.
A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, London Fields is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.
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Success
by Martin Amis
A modern-day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry—from “the Mick Jagger of literature [and] the most dazzling prose stylist in post-war British fiction” (The Daily Telegraph).
In Success Amis pens a mismatched pair of foster brothers—one "a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude," the other a "bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response"—in a single London flat. He binds them with ties of class hatred, sexual rivalry, and disappointed love, and throws in a disloyal girlfriend and a spectacularly unstable sister.
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Success
by Martin Amis
Newly reissued for the modern reader, Martin Amis’s Success is “a terrifying, painfully funny, Swiftian exercise in moral disgust” (The Observer).
Foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding could not be more different from one another―Terry “a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude” and Greg a “bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response.”
After the shocking killing of Terry’s child sister, he is taken in by the aristocratic and wealthy Riding family and introduced to his new foster brother and sister, Greg and Ursula. As adults, the two boys unhappily share a tiny apartment in London. Greg spends his days tormenting Terry and engaging in plenty of messy, meaningless sex, while Terry suffers through a dead-end job and exists wholly in his brother’s cold and looming shadow, licking his wounds from a lifetime of romantic and social failures.
Told throughout the course of one year in Terry and Greg’s lives, Success shows just how fickle luck can be, and how quickly one’s life can be totally, horribly changed. With caustic, searing prose, Success is a firecracker revenge story for the ages.
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Other People
by Martin Amis
"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
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The Rachel Papers
by Martin Amis
In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable -- and curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.
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The Information
by Martin Amis
Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal—they're all here in The Information, asone of the most gifted and innovative novelists of our time explores the question, How does one writer hurt another writer?
"Satirical and tender, funny and disturbing...wonderful." —The New York Times
"A portrait of middle-age realignment with more verbal felicity and unbridled reach than [anything] since Tom Wolfe forged Bonfire of the Vanities." —Houston Chronicle
Richard Tull, a frustrated, failed novelist, stews with envy and humiliation at the success of his oldest friend, Gwyn Barry, who is a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers. He's a terrible writer, but that doesn't comfort Tull as he sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary obscurity. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is to plot the demise of Barry—to gather the information that will lead to his downfall. Meanwhile, both men are being watched by a psychopathic ex-con and a young thug, who have staked out their homes, watching their wives and Richard's small twin boys, waiting until the time is right...
Amis is at his savage best in what has been hailed as one of his greatest books, full of wicked humor and exquisitely turned, cutthroat sentences, "never out of reach of a sparkly phrase, stiletto metaphor or drop-dead insight into the human condition," as the critic Christopher Buckley put it. This is a mesmerizing and entertaining novel of midlife crisis and male friendship, of our brutal culture of fame and fortune and too much information.
"The Information contains some of the most pleasantly wicked passages Amis ever written." (San Franciso Chronicle)
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Time's Arrow
by Martin Amis
In this icy, knife’s-edge story of a life that progresses backward through time, unfolding into one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century, Amis (“at his intriguing, heedful, and powerful best” —Time Out), finds a chillingly original approach to the Holocaust in fiction • From the acclaimed author of Zone of Interest
"The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art." —Newsday
Tod. T. Friendly is living his life in reverse. Doctor Friendly has just died, but he moves “out of blackest sleep” to find himself surrounded by doctors and on the deathbed of a man in whose body he is imprisoned. After weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colors existence in suburban America.
As Friendly breaks up with his lovers in a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home, his life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense. From the fresh-cut lawns of his retirement to the hustle of New York, and then back to the boat which reverses his course to the war-torn Europe Friendly came from, Amis brings the steeliest nerve to the job of realizing the novel’s inevitable logic. Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendly’s consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctor’s most ambitious project yet—the final solution.
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The Zone of Interest (Vintage International)
by Martin Amis
NOW AN ACADEMY AWARD®-WINNING MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From one of the most virtuosic authors in the English language: a powerful novel, written with urgency and moral force, that explores life—and love—among the Nazi bureaucrats of Auschwitz.
"A masterpiece.... Profound, powerful and morally urgent.... A benchmark for what serious literature can achieve." —San Francisco Chronicle
Martin Amis first tackled the Holocaust in 1991 with his bestselling novel Time's Arrow. He returns again to the Shoah with this astonishing portrayal of life in "the zone of interest," or "kat zet"—the Nazis' euphemism for Auschwitz. The narrative rotates among three main characters: Paul Doll, the crass, drunken camp commandant; Thomsen, nephew of Hitler's private secretary, in love with Doll's wife; and Szmul, one of the Jewish prisoners charged with disposing of the bodies. Through these three narrative threads, Amis summons a searing, profound, darkly funny portrait of the most infamous place in history.
An epilogue by the author elucidates Amis's reasons and method for undertaking this extraordinary project.
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Money: A Suicide Note
by Martin Amis
A Searing Critique Of Late-stage Capitalism That Remains A Poignant And Relevant Commentary On The Trappings Of Materialism And The Illusions Of Success-- Provided By Publisher.
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Dead Babies: A Novel
by Martin Amis
Dead Babies, a hilarious Agatha Christie parody and Martin Amis’s second novel, was deemed his “most incendiary” (the BBC).
Within the quiet walls of the Appleseed Rectory, a gorgeous five-bedroom, three-story home in rural England, anything goes: the drugs are consumed with gusto, the booze flows like water, and the sex is near constant and deliciously debauched.
When six uppity twenty-somethings gather at the rectory for a careless weekend away, things quickly go awry. And when someone named Johnny begins leaving threatening letters around the house, the group is thoroughly shaken―no one has any clue who this “Johnny” could be.
A dizzying whirlwind of a novel, Dead Babies is a lurid, sharp, and darkly hilarious indictment of the horrifying vices and shameless self-indulgences of privileged youth.
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The Pregnant Widow
by Martin Amis
The year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the chaotic, ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though blindly dedicated to the cause, its nubile foot soldiers have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory—or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow.
Keith Nearing is stuck in an exquisite limbo. Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long, hot summer in a castle in Italy. The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith’s subsequent love life for decades to come. Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change.
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The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
by Martin Amis
As a journalist, critic, and novelist, Martin Amis has always turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics—politics, sports, celebrity, America, and, of course, literature. Collected here is some of his best nonfiction work from over two decades. Amis writes about finally confronting the effects of aging on his athletic prowess. He revisits the worlds of Bellow and Nabokov, his “twin peaks,” masters who have obsessed and inspired him. And he turns his piercingly observant eye on Donald Trump, whom he finds “scowling out from under an omelette of makeup” in the run-up to the 2016 Republican Convention, and at a post-election rally, regarding his crowd of supporters with a “flat sneer of Ozymandian hauteur.”
Overflowing with startling and singular turns of phrase, and complete with new commentary by the author, The Rub of Time is a vital addition to any bookshelf, and the perfect primer for readers discovering Amis’s fierce talents for the first time.
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House of Meetings
by Martin Amis
An extraordinary novel that ratifies Martin Amis’s standing as “a force unto himself,” as The Washington Post has attested: “There is, quite simply, no one else like him.”
House of Meetings is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings 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.
Harrowing, endlessly surprising, epic in breadth yet intensely intimate, House of Meetings reveals once again that “Amis is a stone-solid genius . . . a dazzling star of wit and insight” (The Wall Street Journal).
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Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
by Martin Amis
A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience.
Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.
The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.
Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.
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Vintage Amis
by Martin Amis
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.”
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The Pregnant Widow (Vintage International)
by Martin Amis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A riotous, bitingly funny, and supremely clever novel of a twenty-year-old literature student in 1970 who’s about to discover the liberating possibilities and haunting consequences of social change.
"A nearly perfect comic novel.” —New York Magazine
The year is 1970, and Keith Nearing, a twenty-year-old literature student, is spending his summer vacation in a castle on a mountainside in Italy. The Sexual Revolution is in full-swing—a historical moment of unprecedented opportunity—and Keith and his friends are immediately caught up in its chaotic, ecstatic throes. Yet they soon discover a disturbing truth: between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of liminal purgatory, once described by the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen as “a pregnant widow.”
As Amis deftly explores the repercussions and consequences of that one summer, he presents us with a precise and poignant portrait of change. Expertly written and full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is Amis at his fearless best.
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The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (Vintage International)
by Martin Amis
A modern classic from one of the most gifted writers of his generation: this collection of essays about 9/11 constitutes a provocative and insightful examination of one of the most momentous events of our time.
“A walking tour of the motley post-September 11th mind—its fears, madnesses, misapprehension and insights.” —New York Observer
At the heart of this collection is the long essay “Terror and Boredom,” an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West's flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran, and Tony Blair's lingering departure from Downing Street (and also his trips to Washington and Iraq).
Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his common sense, wide reading, and astute perspective, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read—informed, elegant, surprising—and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we live with in the twenty-first century.
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House of Meetings (Vintage International)
by Martin Amis
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.
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The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017 (Vintage International)
by Martin Amis
From one of the world’s greatest modern writers: collected here is some of Martin Amis's best nonfiction work from over two decades, ranging from politics and sports to celebrity, America, and literature.
“Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels.”—The Seattle Times
As a journalist, critic, and novelist, Amis has always turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics—politics, sports, celebrity, America, and, of course, literature.
He writes about finally confronting the effects of aging on his athletic prowess. He revisits the worlds of Bellow and Nabokov, his “twin peaks,” masters who have obsessed and inspired him. And he turns his piercingly observant eye on Donald Trump, whom he finds “scowling out from under an omelette of makeup” in the run-up to the 2016 Republican Convention, and at a post-election rally, regarding his crowd of supporters with a “flat sneer of Ozymandian hauteur.”
Overflowing with startling and singular turns of phrase, and complete with new commentary by the author, The Rub of Time is a vital addition to any bookshelf, and the perfect primer for readers discovering Amis’s fierce talents for the first time.
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The War Against Cliche Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
by Martin Amis
Is there anything that Martin Amis can’t write about? In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart.
In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. 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.
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Money: A Suicide Note (Penguin Ink)
by Martin Amis
One of Time’s 100 best novels in the English language—by the acclaimed author of Lionel Asbo: State of England and London Fields
Part of Martin Amis’s “London Trilogy,” along with the novel London Fields and The Information, Money was hailed as "a sprawling, fierce, vulgar display" (The New Republic) and "exhilarating, skillful, savvy" (The Times Literary Supplement) when it made its first appearance in the mid-1980s. Amis’s shocking, funny, and on-target portraits of life in the fast lane form a bold and frightening portrait of Ronald Reagan’s America and Margaret Thatcher’s England.
Money is the hilarious story of John Self, one of London’s top commercial directors, who is given the opportunity to make his first feature film—alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money. He is also living money, talking money, and spending money in his relentless pursuit of pleasure and success. As he attempts to navigate his hedonistic world of drinking, sex, drugs, and excessive quantities of fast food, Self is sucked into a wretched spiral of degeneracy that is increasingly difficult to surface from.
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London Fields: Introduction by John Sutherland (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
by Martin Amis
Martin Amis’s acclaimed novel—now in a twenty-fifth-anniversary hardcover edition—is a blackly comic murder mystery about a murder that has not yet happened.
First published in 1989, LONDON FIELDS is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded millennium approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, attempts to orchestrate her own extinction, choosing her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, LONDON FIELDS is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.
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Dead Babies
by Martin Amis
If the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P. G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME).
“Amis is a born comic novelist in the tradition that ranges from Dickens to Waugh.... [His] mercurial style…can rise to Joycean brilliance” —Newsweek
"Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is...fizzing with style, [and] busy with verbal inventiveness." —Julian Barnes, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending
The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There's even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of "dead babies"—dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.
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The Rachel Papers A Novel
by Martin Amis
Martin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers, tells the story of Charles Highway and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university—with a new introduction by Paul Murray.
Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical Oxford student and soon-to-be Great Novelist, spends the eve of his twentieth birthday reflecting on his adolescence—at times stimulating, often embarrassing, and never nearly as debauched as he’d have liked.
Until he meets Rachel Noyes, an elusive, unattainable, manic pixie mystery of a girl whom Charles quickly becomes entranced by. He meticulously draws up battle plans and strategies for how to seduce Rachel, and thus the “Rachel Papers” are born.
Unflinchingly honest, comedically brilliant, and unapologetically original, Martin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers, is a masterful account of the passion and fickleness of first lust—and love.
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$19.00
Einstein's Monsters Stories
by Martin Amis
With a new introduction by Jeff VanderMeer, this powerful collection of five short stories explores the dangers of nuclear warfare—written by the renowned author of Money and London Fields.
Reckoning with the nuclear age from one of Britain’s most incisive and unnerving cultural critics.
In Einstein’s Monsters, Martin Amis turns his formidable gaze on the atomic shadow cast over the late twentieth century. Through five unsettling stories and a scalding introductory essay, he explores what it means to live with the knowledge that humanity now possesses the means—and perhaps the appetite—for its own extinction.
Written at the height of the Second Cold War, Einstein’s Monsters blends speculative fiction, philosophical inquiry, and savage satire. Amis dissects the madness of deterrence, the numbing doublespeak of political language, and the eerie banality of apocalypse with his usual mix of moral urgency and mordant humor.
Featuring a new introduction by Jeff VanderMeer, who situates Amis’s nuclear nightmares within the context of our own age of existential dread, Einstein’s Monsters is not just a warning—it’s a mirror.
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$18.00
Lionel Asbo: State of England A Novel
by Martin Amis
A wickedly funny, grotesquely exaggerated portrait of modern Britain, as seen through the rise of one of Amis’s most outrageous characters.
In the brutal concrete landscape of Diston Town, teenage Des Pepperdine is doing his best to stay invisible—reading poetry, avoiding trouble, and nursing a dangerous secret. But his guardian, Lionel Asbo, is a ferocious presence: a pit-bull-breeding, tabloid-devouring career criminal with a gift for violence and a hatred of books. When Lionel wins the lottery from inside prison and becomes an overnight millionaire, Des is dragged along for the ride, caught between survival, loyalty, and the faint hope of something better.
With savage humor and a Dickensian eye for the grotesque, Lionel Asbo: State of England captures a nation enthralled by celebrity and excess. It’s a darkly comic portrait of a young man coming of age in a culture that confuses notoriety with success, and a meditation on the quiet courage it takes to resist chaos from within your own home.
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$18.00