Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
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.”
Vintage Amis
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
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.”
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
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.”
House of Meetings
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030726730X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030726730X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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.
The Zone of Interest
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0385353502
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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.
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0385353502
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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.
Night Train
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307787141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159
Book Description
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 Journal Detective 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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307787141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159
Book Description
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 Journal Detective 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.
Koba the Dread
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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.
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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.
Experience
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101910240
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101910240
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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.
Dead Babies
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030777774X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
If the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P. G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME). “Amis is a born comic novelist in the tradition that ranges from Dickens to Waugh.... [His] mercurial style…can rise to Joycean brilliance” —Newsweek "Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is...fizzing with style, [and] busy with verbal inventiveness." —Julian Barnes, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There's even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of "dead babies"—dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030777774X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
If the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P. G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME). “Amis is a born comic novelist in the tradition that ranges from Dickens to Waugh.... [His] mercurial style…can rise to Joycean brilliance” —Newsweek "Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is...fizzing with style, [and] busy with verbal inventiveness." —Julian Barnes, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There's even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of "dead babies"—dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.
The Old Devils
Author: Kingsley Amis
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175921
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Booker Prize Winner A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post). Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175921
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Booker Prize Winner A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post). Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
The Alteration
Author: Kingsley Amis
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick). In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick). In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
By Its Cover
Author: Ned Drew
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568984971
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
We all know we're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but the truth is that we do just that nearly every time we walk into a bookstore or pull a book off a tightly packed shelf. It's really not something we should be ashamed about, for it reinforces something we sincerely believe: design matters. At its best, book cover design is an art that transcends the publisher's commercial imperativesto reflect both an author's ideas and contemporary cultural values in a vital, intelligent, and beautiful way. In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated history, authors Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger establish American book cover design as a tradition of sophisticated, visual excellence that has put shape to our literary landscape. By Its Cover traces the story of the American book cover from its inception as a means of utilitarian protection for the book to its current status as an elaborately produced form of communication art. It is, at once, the intertwined story of American graphic design and American literature, and features the work of such legendary figures as Rockwell Kent, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Rudy deHarak, and Roy Kuhlman along with more recent and contemporary innovators including Push Pin Studios, Chermayeff & Geismar, Karen Goldberg, Chip Kidd, and John Gall.
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568984971
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
We all know we're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but the truth is that we do just that nearly every time we walk into a bookstore or pull a book off a tightly packed shelf. It's really not something we should be ashamed about, for it reinforces something we sincerely believe: design matters. At its best, book cover design is an art that transcends the publisher's commercial imperativesto reflect both an author's ideas and contemporary cultural values in a vital, intelligent, and beautiful way. In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated history, authors Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger establish American book cover design as a tradition of sophisticated, visual excellence that has put shape to our literary landscape. By Its Cover traces the story of the American book cover from its inception as a means of utilitarian protection for the book to its current status as an elaborately produced form of communication art. It is, at once, the intertwined story of American graphic design and American literature, and features the work of such legendary figures as Rockwell Kent, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Rudy deHarak, and Roy Kuhlman along with more recent and contemporary innovators including Push Pin Studios, Chermayeff & Geismar, Karen Goldberg, Chip Kidd, and John Gall.