Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446401707
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel. As Charles's twentieth birthday - and the Oxford entrance exams - loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous 'Rachel Papers'. WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 'Scurrilous, shameless and very funny' The Times Literary Supplement 'Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving' Peter Ackroyd
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.
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.
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.
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101910259
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection, Martin Amis, "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME), takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton, and more. "[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache.... Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading but also to a fascination with individual writers." —The New York Times Here, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. Above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches—not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030726730X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel set in 1946, starring two brothers and a Jewish girl who fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (Time). “A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.” —The New York Times The brothers' fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307743977
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Book Description
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.
Author: Elinor Lipman
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0358653258
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
]Rachel to the Rescue is a mischievous political satire, with a delightful cast of characters, from one of America's funniest novelists.
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099563029
Category : London (England)
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
This is the story of John Self, consumer extraordinaire. Ceaselessly inventive and savage, this is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money, the terrible things it can do and the disasters it can precipitate.
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
