Lionel Asbo

Lionel Asbo PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446476758
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Lionel Asbo has just won £139,999,999.50 on the Lottery. A horribly violent, but horribly unsuccessful criminal, Lionel’s attentions up to now have all been on his nephew, Desmond Pepperdine. He showers him with fatherly advice (‘carry a knife’) and introduces Des to the joys of internet porn. Meanwhile, Des desires nothing more than books, a girl to love and to steer clear Uncle Li’s psychotic pitbulls, Joe and Jeff. But Lionel’s winnings are not necessarily all good news. For Des has a secret, and its discovery could unleash his uncle’s implacable vengeance. ‘One of Amis's funniest novels’ New Yorker ‘A book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely’ Observer

Lionel Asbo

Lionel Asbo PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446476758
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lionel Asbo has just won £139,999,999.50 on the Lottery. A horribly violent, but horribly unsuccessful criminal, Lionel’s attentions up to now have all been on his nephew, Desmond Pepperdine. He showers him with fatherly advice (‘carry a knife’) and introduces Des to the joys of internet porn. Meanwhile, Des desires nothing more than books, a girl to love and to steer clear Uncle Li’s psychotic pitbulls, Joe and Jeff. But Lionel’s winnings are not necessarily all good news. For Des has a secret, and its discovery could unleash his uncle’s implacable vengeance. ‘One of Amis's funniest novels’ New Yorker ‘A book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely’ Observer

Yellow Dog

Yellow Dog PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
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

The Pregnant Widow

The Pregnant Widow PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307593576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the chaotic, ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though blindly dedicated to the cause, its nubile foot soldiers have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory—or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow. Keith Nearing is stuck in an exquisite limbo. Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long, hot summer in a castle in Italy. The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith’s subsequent love life for decades to come. Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change.

Experience

Experience PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101910240
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • One of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels. “Superb memoir...a moving account of [Amis’s] coming of age as an artist and a man.” —San Francisco Chronicle 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.

Inside Story

Inside Story PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593318307
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 623

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Book Description
An autobiographical novel that’s a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die—from “the Mick Jagger of literature ... Amis is the most dazzling prose stylist in post-war British fiction” (The Daily Telegraph). “[A] charismatic compound of fact and fiction ... Martin Amis has retained the power to surprise.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books, and where to lunch), Hitch was Amis's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps—an obsession Amis must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness. Other figures competing as Amis's main influencers are his literary fathers—Kingsley, of course; his hero Saul Bellow; the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin—and his significant literary mothers, including Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Moving among these greats to set his own path, he winds up surveying the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of the 9/11 attacks on the twenty-first—and considers what all of this has taught him about how to live and how to be a writer. The result is a love letter to life—and to the people in his life—that achieves a new level of confidentiality with his readers, giving us the previously unseen portrait of his extraordinary world.

The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0385353502
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From one the most virtuosic authors in the English language: a powerful novel, written with urgency and moral force, that explores life—and love—among the Nazi bureaucrats of Auschwitz. "A masterpiece.... Profound, powerful and morally urgent.... A benchmark for what serious literature can achieve." —San Francisco Chronicle Martin Amis first tackled the Holocaust in 1991 with his bestselling novel Time's Arrow. He returns again to the Shoah with this astonishing portrayal of life in "the zone of interest," or "kat zet"—the Nazis' euphemism for Auschwitz. The narrative rotates among three main characters: Paul Doll, the crass, drunken camp commandant; Thomsen, nephew of Hitler's private secretary, in love with Doll's wife; and Szmul, one of the Jewish prisoners charged with disposing of the bodies. Through these three narrative threads, Amis summons a searing, profound, darkly funny portrait of the most infamous place in history. An epilogue by the author elucidates Amis's reasons and method for undertaking this extraordinary project.

England, England

England, England PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 030736755X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Grotesque visionary Sir Jack Pitman has an idea. Since most people are too lazy to travel from landmark to landmark, why not simplify things and create a new England on the Isle of Wight? Unfortunately, his idea is a huge success, and the resulting theme park threatens to supersede the original. Called England, England, it has all the elements of "Old England" in one convenient location. Wander into the new Sherwood Forest and you may spot Robin Hood and his now sexually ambiguous Merrie Men. Or take a stroll to see Stonehenge and Anne Hathaway's Cottage, enjoy a ploughman's lunch atop the White Cliffs of Dover, then pop over to see the Royals, now on contract to Sir Jack, in their scaled-down version of Buckingham Palace. Every detail has been considered: even the postcards come pre-stamped! Julian Barnes' first novel in six years is a ferociously funny examination of the search for authenticity and truth in a fabricated world.

Koba the Dread

Koba the Dread PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.

The Rub of Time

The Rub of Time PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520252
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
From one of the world’s greatest modern writers: collected here is some of Martin Amis's best nonfiction work from over two decades, ranging from politics and sports to celebrity, America, and literature. “Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels.”—The Seattle Times As a journalist, critic, and novelist, Amis has always turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics—politics, sports, celebrity, America, and, of course, literature. He writes about finally confronting the effects of aging on his athletic prowess. He revisits the worlds of Bellow and Nabokov, his “twin peaks,” masters who have obsessed and inspired him. And he turns his piercingly observant eye on Donald Trump, whom he finds “scowling out from under an omelette of makeup” in the run-up to the 2016 Republican Convention, and at a post-election rally, regarding his crowd of supporters with a “flat sneer of Ozymandian hauteur.” Overflowing with startling and singular turns of phrase, and complete with new commentary by the author, The Rub of Time is a vital addition to any bookshelf, and the perfect primer for readers discovering Amis’s fierce talents for the first time.

Umbrella

Umbrella PDF Author: Will Self
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408841215
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
"A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."--James Joyce, "Ulysses" 1918 Audrey Death--feminist, socialist and munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenal--falls ill with encephalitis lethargica as the epidemic rages across Europe, killing a third of its victims and condemning a further third to living death. 1971 Under the curious eyes of psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, assumed mental patient Audrey Death lies supine in bed above a spring grotto that she has made every one of the forty-nine years she has resided in Friern Mental Hospital. 2010 Now retired, Dr. Busner travels waywardly across North London in search of the truth about that tumultuous summer when he awoke the post-encephalitic patients under his care using a new and powerful drug. Weaving together a dense tapestry of consciousness and lived life across an entire century, in his latest and most ambitious novel, Will Self takes up the challenge of Modernism and reveals how it--and it alone--can unravel new and unsettling truths about our world and how it came to be.