Items related to Lionel Asbo Lib/E: State of England
A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers.
Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious Anti-Social Behavior Order), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls, Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love-and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him. But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle-once again in a London prison-wins 140 million in the lottery and, upon his release, hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and poet. Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised while his problems, and therefore also Desmond's, seem only to multiply.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Martin Amis is the author of twelve novels, four collections of stories, and seven collections of nonfiction.
Review:
Lionel Asbo is at heart an old-fashioned novel, earnest in its agenda...Amis is...an insistently moral writer, satire being an edifying genre with a noble cause: the improvement of society.
Amis' language is electric, his wit as sharp and precise than it has been in a decade, and Lionel Asbo has a savage, post-apocalyptic feel.
Little fiction is more entertaining than Martin Amis at his pithy best. His latest novel posits plenty of pith and cutting cultural criticism. It is wild. It is whacked. [It] swings between wildly funny and harshly real.
In his thirteenth novel-one of his most compulsively readable-wily, dead-on satirist and consummate artist Martin Amis is grandly acerbic, funny, and unnerving...He leads us on, shakes us up, knocks us down, brushes us off, then does it all over again...With crisp insights, rollicking storytelling, and acrobatic wit, Amis has created a...hilarious dismantlement of our cherished rags-to-riches fantasy.
Lionel Asbo bears a strong resemblance to the trio of novels that made Amis' reputation. Like them, it is a satirical work...and has an elaborate plot, a series of brilliant set pieces and a matchless sense of the contemporary demotic...Lionel Asbo maybe be even better than these ambitious works of fiction, more disciplined, funnier, and more inventive....To say that it is a return to form is an understatement-it might be his finest work.
A joy-and strangely life-affirming... It certainly has much of the dazzling prose that made his earlier works so stand-out.
[Lionel Asbo] is a great big confidence trick of a novel-an attack that turns into an embrace-a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely. It is every inch the novel that we all deserve.
A wicked satire [and] frequently wincingly funny. Amis' aim at the totems and mores of common fame is as unerring, and his phrase-making as pyrotechnically dazzling, as ever...Amis also writes with real-and uncharacteristic-tenderness.
A surprisingly tender story.
A ripper of a story, in the Dickens mode... Amis is the most original sentence-writer in English.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBlackstone Publishing
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 0792787021
- ISBN 13 9780792787020
- BindingAudio CD
- Number of pages8
- Rating
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