Martin Amis

'The best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years' Literary Review There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR.

Näyttelijä Xan Meo ajautuu tappeluun lontoolaisessa pubissa ja lyö päänsä. Tällin jälkeen vaimo ja tyttäret huomaavat elävänsä ventovieraan ja arvaamattoman miehen kanssa. Pahimmat asiat tapahtuvat makuuhuoneessa. Ei. Kaikkein pahinta on, että Xan putoaa menneisyyteen, alkaa käyttäytyä kuin luolamiehet. Martin Amis piirtää pirullisen muotokuvan 2000-luvun miehistä, joita alkukantaisten viettien rippeet yhä johdattavat. Kulttikirjailijan hampaissa ovat myös pornoteollisuus, brittikuninkaalliset ja keltainen lehdistö.

At the age of ten, when Martin Amis spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, he was excited and frightened by America.

Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes, Martin Amis provides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike: Larkin and Rushdie; Sex without Madonna, expulsion from school, a Stones gig that should have been gagged, on set with Robocop or on court with Gabriela Sabatini, this is Martin Amis at his electric best.

Rolling between London and New York he closes movie deals and spends feverishly, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography and mountains of junk food. 'Terribly, terminally funny: laughter in the dark, if ever I heard it' Guardian

Gregory leads an existence of formidable foppishness, his days and nights a series of effortless, titillating conquests. His foster brother, Terry, has to make do with the leavings as he trawls through life in a miasma of grief. But roles are reversed with both lives dramatically changed.

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.

Compiles essays discussing, and in some cases condemning, such people and topics as movie violence, Margaret Thatcher, Charles Dickens, Michael Crichton, Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, poker, and world literature. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

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."

'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent

The stories in this collection form a unity and reveal a deep preoccupation: '"Einstein's Monsters" refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves,' writes Amis in his enlightening introductory essay, 'We are Einstein's monsters: not fully human, not for now.'

When she awakes and realizes she is all right, that Time is starting again, it seems fitting that she should lie on a spindly white trolley in a white room. A nearby voice tells she is on her own now and to be good. Was she not good before? This story unfolds a metaphysical thriller where jealously guarded secrets jostle with startling insights.

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 JournalDetective 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.

Detective Hoolihan, a policewoman, a police in cop parlance, begins to investigate the death of Jennifer. The evidence swings towards suicide - the gun in her hand, the suicide note, the secret history of depression and drug addiction, and then swings away; could be suicide administer three and why does the autopsy reveal no sign of drug abuse?

Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal--they're all here in The Information, as one 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 ChronicleRichard 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)

"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

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.

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.