Heavy Water And Other Stories

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To this tantalizing nonfiction collection Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. The first was along the lines I expected, having read London Fields, but not finding it particularly special. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Not all these miniatures work (some are badly dated, others are over-inflated), yet the volume provides a useful touchstone to the stylistic vagaries and vicissitudes of the man who has become the dystopian voice of our distempered times.

The Coincidence of the Arts" (1997) in which an English Baronet becomes entangled with an American chess hustler and aspiring novelist and has an unexpected affair with a silent Afro-Caribbean woman. There was also important experimentation with the short story genre, evidenced particularly in Heavy Water (1998), a collection characterised by the use of ‘doubles’ and ‘invented worlds’. In 2010, after a period of writing, rewriting, editing and revision dating back to 2003 – "by far the longest writing-time of all [his] books" [75] – Amis published The Pregnant Widow, a long novel concerned with the sexual revolution. The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. In a highly critical Guardian article, entitled "The absurd world of Martin Amis", satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employed "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran" to incite hatred.A loose trilogy of novels set in London begins with Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed, continues with London Fields (1989), and concludes with The Information (1995), a tale of literary rivalry. Amis was knighted in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for services to literature, with the knighthood being backdated to the day before his death. The early career as a literary journalist soon gave way to recognition as a cult-ish novelist producing a series of funny, dark, perverse tales of youth in the city (The Rachel Papers, 1973; Dead Babies, 1975; Other People: A Mystery Story, 1981).

I can point out the exact place where he stopped [reading Amis's novel Money] and sent it twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016” “The War Against Cliché” “The Zone of Interest” “Time’s Arrow” “Visiting Mrs.

At their best, those famous sentences continue to be some of the most powerful in British fiction, and though it now seems more often to be for the wrong reasons, the publication of an Amis novel remains an event in contemporary writing. According to Amis's autobiographical collection Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences. Some of his younger admirers such as the novelist Nicola Barker, seen by many as an inheritor of the Amis mantle, proved that the cathartic potential of his provocations was still alive: “Is [ Lionel Asbo] an offensive book? He was Literary Editor of the New Statesman between 1977 and 1979, publishing his third novel, Success, in 1978.