Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, and other excursions - Hardcover

Amis, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224038249 ISBN 13: 9780224038249

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1993

Synopsis

These essays by Martin Amis provide portraits of contemporaries and mentors: Larkin and Rushdie, Burgess, Ballard, Nicholson Baker and John Updike. From across the Atlantic, he exposes the double-think of nuke-speak in Washington and the dementia of a Republican convention in New Orleans. And then there is sport. Checking out darts' disastrous attempt to clean itself up, Amis sneaks tips from the world number one, and witnesses the sad and sudden decline of Keith Deller. An account of dirty tricks in world chess reveals, "It's not an art. It's a fight." And so it is when he takes on the snooker savvy of Julian "Barometer" Barnes, or indulges in some brisk, but vicious poker with Al Alvarez and David Mamet. "Sex" without Madonna, expulsion from school, the Notting Hill Carnival, a Stones gig that should have been gagged - it's all here, as well as on set with Robocop or set-down with Sabatini. Martin Amis is the author of "The Rachel Papers", "Success", "Other People", "Dead Babies", "The Moronic Inferno", "Money", "Einstein's Monsters", "London Fields" and "Time's Arrow".

About this title

From the Inside Flap

To this tantalizing nonfiction collection 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."

From the Back Cover

"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

John Updike: "His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity."

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0224038249
• ISBN 13: 9780224038249
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 274