Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov

Author: Martin Amis

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-01-26

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0307777790

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A tantalizing collection of classic essays from one of the most gifted writers of his generation. • "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 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." "His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity." —John Updike

Visiting Mrs Nabokov
Visiting Mrs Nabokov

Author: Martin Amis

Publisher: Christian Bourgois Editeur

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 9782267013900

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" Je relis avec circonspection ces articles qui me font remonter dans le temps : j'y entrevois un foisonnement de mondes altérés ou disparus, dont ceux de mes jeunes et de mes très jeunes années. Les choses changent. Graham Greene est mort. Véra Nabokov est morte. Salman Rushdie est toujours en vie mais toujours caché. La dissuasion nucléaire est morte et enterrée. Asimov est mort. On ne fait même plus attention aux seins nus sur les plages. Je ne circule plus autant qu'avant. J'ai récemment lu une critique d'un recueil du même genre. Elle le comparait à une " braderie à domicile " où l'auteur se débarrassait de ses vieilleries littéraires dans un cadre informel. Que mes lecteurs veuillent bien me croire : je leur promets que j'ai bien éliminé, autant que j'ai gardé. " Martin Amis, 1993.

Martin Amis
Martin Amis

Author: Nick Bentley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 0746311788

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Nick Bentley offers a critical analysis to the main themes and literary techniques of Martin Amis, a leading literary figure who has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive literary style.

Martin Amis
Martin Amis

Author: Richard Bradford

Publisher: Constable

Published: 2011-11-03

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1849018502

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Martin Amis's life could itself provide the formula for an enthralling work of fiction. Son of one of the most popular and best-loved novelists of the post-War era, he has forged a groundbreaking manner of writing that owes nothing to the style of his father, nor indeed to anyone else. He relished and recorded the bizarre, turbulent atmosphere of Britain and the US during the 1970s and 80s, arguably the transformative period of the late 20th century. No other contemporary writer has proved so magnetic for the popular press: he has, despite himself, achieved celebrity status. Of late, his reputation as a novelist has been matched by his outspoken, challenging writing on contemporary global politics, and he has earned the status as the Orwell of the early 21st century. Martin Amis offers the real Martin Amis, a cabinet of contrasts: tortured, eloquently aloof, kind, obsessive, loved by women, a dedicated family man, often the architect of his own undoing, and a literary genius. Moreover, this fascinating biography discloses the autobiographical thread that runs through Amis's books. Richard Bradford has talked with Amis at length, questioned him on his childhood, his private history, his opinions and the inspiration for his fiction, and these exchanges are supplemented by interviews with a large number of his friends and fellow writers. Praise for Richard Bradford's previous titles: Praise for Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis: 'Nearly all critical biographies relate the work to the life - insidiously, tendentiously, helplessly. Richard Bradford is different: he does it convincingly, and with vigour. The result is an original and stimulating book'. Martin Amis 'I found Bradford's approach refreshing. Rare among literary academics he writes clearly, doesn't show off and knows a lot about his subject. He presents a fascinating chronicle of the development of Amis's brilliant ear for speech... He also brings out the full extent of the symbiosis between Amis and his best friend Philip Larkin: in a way Larkin invented Amis.' Craig Brown 'At his better moments Bradford... rises to Amis's stylistic level.' Humphrey Carpenter

Martin Amis
Martin Amis

Author: Brian Finney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1136015426

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Booker-shortlisted for Time's Arrow and widely known for his novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and autobiographical works, Martin Amis is one of the most influential of contemporary British writers. This guide to Amis's diverse and often controversial work offers: an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of his texts, from publication to the present an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Amis's life and work, situated within a broader critical history cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Martin Amis and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

Vintage Amis
Vintage Amis

Author: Martin Amis

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0307429938

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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.”

Koba the Dread
Koba the Dread

Author: Martin Amis

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-08-13

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0307368297

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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.

Experience
Experience

Author: Martin Amis

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-10-29

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0307368254

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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. He explores his relationship with his beloved father, novelist Kingsley Amis, and 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 dissects the literary scene, and includes Amis'portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, and Ian McEwan, among others. Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent.

British Fiction Today
British Fiction Today

Author: Rod Mengham

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2006-11-07

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1441181059

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British Fiction Today provides students and readers with a critical introduction to key authors and novels since 1990 and provides the latest critical perspectives on current British fiction. It offers comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a broad range of selected contemporary authors, drawing together both established and emerging literary voices reflecting the scope of the new British writing. The book is organised around common themes - Modern Lives, Contemporary Living; Dreamtime; States of Identity and Histories. Each section begins with a short introductory essay and ends with a guide to further reading. Introducing key works, writers and major themes including post-colonialism, pluralism, gender and history, this book is the ideal guide to British fiction today. Includes discussion of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Alan Hollinghurst, Peter Ackroyd, Jenny Diski, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Toby Litt, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Jeanetter Winterson, Pat Barker, A S Byatt, Adam Thorpe and Sarah Waters.

The Wives
The Wives

Author: Alexandra Popoff

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1639361324

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Many readers may know that such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material. In Russian literary marriages, these women did not resent taking a secondary position, although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. From Sofia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov and Elena Mandelshtam and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers’ illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West. Many of these women, like Vera and Sofia, were the writers’ intellectual companions and willingly contributed to the creative process—they commonly used the word “we” to describe the progress of their husbands’ work. And their husbands knew it too. Leo Tolstoy made no secret of Sofia’s involvement in War and Peace, and Vladimir Nabokov referred to Vera as his own “single shadow.”