Martin Amis

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Terror And Boredom: Some Reactions to September 11

Martin Amis

A thought-provoking anthology of fourteen essays and reviews furnishes an incisive study of September 11 and its aftermath, in a volume that includes "Terror and Boredom," a study of Islamic fundamentalism and the Western response to it, as well as other reactions to the event and its implications. 35,000 first printing.

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Yellow Dog

Martin Amis

Brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny as hell, Yellow Dog is Martin Amis’ highly anticipated first novel in seven years and a stunning return to the fictional form.

When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury, and personality change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. 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.

Meo heard no footsteps; what he heard was the swish, the shingly soft-shoe of the hefted sap. Then the sharp two-finger prod on his shoulder. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. They expected him to turn and he didn’t turn -- he half-turned, then veered and ducked. So the blow intended merely to break his cheekbone or his jawbone was instead received by the cranium, that spacey bulge (in this instance still quite marriageably forested) where so many delicate and important powers are so trustingly encased.

He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat. . . . -- from Yellow Dog


From the Hardcover edition.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2003, 2003

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Vintage Amis

Martin Amis

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.

“Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels.” —The Seattle Times

Equally at home in satirical novels and biting critical essays, wickedly funny short stories and intimate autobiography, 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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Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Martin Amis

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The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000

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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Other editions: 2001, Hardcover - 2001

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Experience: A Memoir

Martin Amis

Martin Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time. With Experience, he discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels.

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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Other editions: Hardcover - 2000

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Heavy Water and Other Stories

Martin Amis

Nine dazzling stories make up this volume of unique and alluring fiction. In "Career Move, " poets are flown first-class to Hollywood in order to take meetings with sandal-shod produces. Witness the world of "Straight Fiction" in which everyone is gay except the beleaguered straight community. Heavy Water and Other Stories is the most engaging overview of Martin Amis's considerable short story talent ever.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1999, Hardcover - 1999

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Night Train

Martin Amis

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. Fusing brilliant wordplay with all the elements of a classic whodunit, 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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Other editions: Hardcover - 1998, 1998, Hardcover - 1998, Softcover - 1998, 1997

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Heavy Water: And Other Stories

Martin Amis

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The Information

Martin Amis

Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal--they're all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mills over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is the plot the demise of Barry."With The Information, Amis delivers a portrait of middle-age realignment with more verbal felicity and unbridled reach than [anyone] since Tom Wolfe forged Bonfire of the Vanities."--Houston Chronicle

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1995, Hardcover - 1995

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions

Martin Amis

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Other editions: 1993

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Other People: A Mystery Story

Martin Amis

In this eerie and sometimes disorienting dark comedy, Amis gives us a 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.

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Other editions: 1981, 1981

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Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense

Martin Amis

In Times Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense."The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art."--Newsday

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Other editions: 1992, Softcover - 1992, Hardcover - 1991

Time's Arrow, Or, The Nature of the Offense

Martin Amis

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The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis

In Amis's first novel, he gives 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 Highway 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 in love with her.

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Other editions: Softcover - 1988, 1974, 1973

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London Fields

Martin Amis

London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?"A comic murder mystery, an apocalyptic satire, a scatological meditation on love and death and nuclear winter...by turns lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1990, 1989

Time's Arrow, Or, The Nature of the Offence

Martin Amis

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Dead Babies

Martin Amis

"Sparkling might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe a novel packed with the concentrated disgust which Dead Babies contains. Nevertheless, Martin Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is so fizzing with style, so busy with verbal inventiveness, that the adjective is impelled upon one."--Julian Barnes, author of Before She Met Me

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Other editions: 1976, 1975

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Success

Martin Amis

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 to create a modern-day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1987, 1978

London Fields/Audio Cassettes

Martin Amis; Cazenove Christopher

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Einstein's Monsters

Martin Amis

A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1987

Granta 25: Murder

Martin Amis

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The Moronic Inferno

Martin Amis

With mixed feelings of wonder and trepidation, the brilliant British writer Martin Amis approaches America and introduces this sharp and thoroughly stimulating collection of "American" pieces. From Claus von Bulow to the New Evangelists, little escapes Amis' curiosity.

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The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America

Martin Amis

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Other editions: 1986

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Money

Martin Amis

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Other editions: Softcover - 1986, Hardcover - 1985, 1984