The War Against Cliche

The War Against Cliche PDF 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.

The War Against Cliche

The War Against Cliche PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101910259
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Get Book Here

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.

The War Against Cliche

The War Against Cliche PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368289
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the preeminent novelist-critic of his generation. Always entertaining, with a razor-sharp wit and inimitable judgment, he expounds on a dazzling range of topics from chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, to Andy Warhol, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Margaret Thatcher. The very best of his essays and reviews from the past twenty-five years are brought together in this substantial and wide-ranging collection, including pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Philip Larkin, Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, Nabokov, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Shiva and V.S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton,V.S. Pritchett and John Updike.

The War Against Cliche

The War Against Cliche PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407018574
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation. The War Against Cliché is a selection of his reviews and essays over the past quarter-century. It contains pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Philip Larkin, Joyce, Waugh, Lowry, Nabokov, F. R. Leavis, V. S. Pritchett, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Shiva and V. S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton, Thomas Harris - and John Updike. Other subjects include chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, juvenile violence, Andy Warhol, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher.

Clichés

Clichés PDF Author: Nigel Fountain
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books
ISBN: 184317796X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Entertaining and informative, this collection of clichés really is the best thing since sliced bread ...

The Tyranny of Clichés

The Tyranny of Clichés PDF Author: Jonah Goldberg
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1595231021
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
“An indispensable and enduring field guide to the arguments the left makes—and the ones it tries to avoid.” —The Claremont Review of Books According to Jonah Goldberg, if the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves they’re not ideological. Today, “objective” journalists, academics, and “moderate” politicians peddle some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun apho­risms. Barack Obama casts himself as a disciple of reason: He’s a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and drama of the Right, solely concerned with “what works.” And today’s liberals follow his lead, spouting countless clichés such as: • One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter? • Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with King George III and ended slavery. • We need complete separation of church and state: In other words, all expressions of faith should be barred from politics . . . except when they support liberal programs. With humor and passion, Goldberg dismantles these and many other Trojan horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He shows that the Pro­gressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false flag of reasonableness is alive and well. And he reveals how this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

The Rub of Time

The Rub of Time PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0735273790
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The definitive collection of essays and reportage written during the past thirty years from one of most provocative and widely read writers--with new commentary by the author. For more than thirty years, Martin Amis has turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics--politics, sports, celebrity, America, and, of course, literature. Now, at last, these incomparable essays have been gathered together. Here is Amis at the 2011 GOP Iowa Caucus, where, squeezed between "windbreakers and woolly hats," he pores over The Ron Paul Family Cookbook and laments the absence of "our Banquo," Herman Cain. He writes about finally confronting the effects of aging on his athletic prowess. He revisits, time and time again, the worlds of Bellow and Nabokov, his "twin peaks," masters who have obsessed and inspired him. Brilliant, incisive, and savagely funny, The Rub of Time is a vital addition to any Amis fan's bookshelf, and the perfect primer for readers discovering his fierce and tremendous talents for the first time.

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.

Understanding Martin Amis

Understanding Martin Amis PDF Author: James Diedrick
Publisher: Understanding Contemporary Bri
ISBN: 9781570035166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
"Diedrick also analyzes an increasing cultural conservatism in Amis's work, rooted in Amis's relationship with his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. During the first two decades of his career, the younger Amis consistently opposed his father's political and aesthetic conservatism. But his opposition has given way in recent years to frequent expressions of political and literary solidarity. Diedrick shows how this filial relationship continues to shape the son's social outlook and his career as a writer."--BOOK JACKET.

The War of Art

The War of Art PDF Author: Steven Pressfield
Publisher: Black Irish Entertainment LLC
ISBN: 1936891042
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
What keeps so many of us from doing what we long to do? Why is there a naysayer within? How can we avoid the roadblocks of any creative endeavor—be it starting up a dream business venture, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece? The War of Art identifies the enemy that every one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer this internal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success. The War of Art emphasizes the resolve needed to recognize and overcome the obstacles of ambition and then effectively shows how to reach the highest level of creative discipline. Think of it as tough love . . . for yourself.

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.