Martin Amis Books

Shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize 'Surely his masterpieceâe¦ Intelligent, terrifying and comicâe¦ Amis has tackled the biggest questions with imagination and intelligence, and the ultimate strength of this masterly novel is that he knows, and shows, that although there is no answer to the questions Auschwitz poses, we must never stop asking them. Read it, ponder it âe" revel in it indeed âe" then read it again.' Allan Massie, Scotsman There was an old story about a king who asked his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didnâe(tm)t show you your reflection. Instead, it showed you your soul âe" it showed you who you really were. But the king couldnâe(tm)t look into the mirror without turning away, and nor could his courtiers. No one could. What happens when we discover who we really are? And how do we come to terms with it? Fearless and original, The Zone of Interest is a violently dark love story set against a backdrop of unadulterated evil, and a vivid journey into the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and unafraid... He is sweetly sentimental when it comes to the British royal family (why?), funny about tennis, always brilliant about the body, scorching in his refusal of death, its sorrows and humiliations... He is a great believer in semantic rigour; every sentence snaps with an accuracy that is fresh and fierce... This collection is full of treasures. Anne Enright Guardian

The son of the 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.

'Utterly compelling' Guardian Life...is shapeless, it does not point to and gather round anything, it does not cohere. Artistically, it's dead. Life's dead. So begins a love letter to life, a resuscitation of sorts, encountering vibrant characters from Saul Bellow, to Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated Amis' twenties, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps. Amis addresses our burning questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die?

Addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, this work gives us information about Stalin: Koba the Dread, losif the Terrible.

In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward in time toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.

Here, accompanied by dozens of unique photographs, are the very best of Victor Bockris's infamous interviews, essays, and observations on the stars of downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s. The internationally acclaimed biographer Bockris was there as a witness, friend, collaborator, and co-conspirator. Some of the stars were founding members of Beat or Punk, others were just passing through. But all of them—rockers, rebels, artists, and intellectuals—revealed more to Bockris than they did to any other writer: Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Debbie Harry, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Terry Southern, Martin Amis, and Susan Sontag. Bockris's conclusion—that Punk owed the Beats a big debt and that the Beats were in turn re-animated by the Punks—is argued from the perspective of someone who was in the thick of it, and who loved every minute of it.

Martin Amis provides portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike.

Porn freak and jetsetter, John Self, is the shameless heir to a fast-food culture where money beats out an invitation to futile self-gratification. Out in New York, mingling with the mighty, Self is embroiled in the corruption, the brutality and the obscenity of the money conspiracy.

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means.

Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal--they're all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mills over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is to plot the demise of Barry. -- Publisher description

Gregory's life is a series of effortless conquests. Sister, employers, acquaintances are but co-stars among a cast of thousands to have passed through his bed. His foster-brother, Terry, has to make do with the leavings as he pursues his own existence of squalid mediocrity. But roles are reversed.

"Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase banish porno, and you banish all of the world." Martin Amis A land where sex is simulated, evoked, glorified, supercharged in the extreme, a land where everything is about the body, in its possible and perverse sexual combinations....This is Pornoland, a strange, parallel universe where pornographic films are churned out on a daily basis. Photographs by Stefano de Luigi and a text by Martin Amis are the guides through this world, filled with actors capable of extraordinary performances (although not the kind that would ever win Oscars), directors who can make an entire film in just one day, improvised sets, almost nonexistent plots, and locations that stay exactly the same from one day to the next. The journey encompasses Milan, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Tokyo, Dortmund, and Los Angeles. It includes no trite moralizing, hasty judgments, or yearnings for redemption. Stefano de Luigi's images and Martin Amis's words use respect, humor, and irony to tell the story of a rarely glimpsed world full of crude colors and harsh brutality, bodily contortions and bursts of laughter, unexpected tenderness and situations on the very edge of the absurd. 54 color illustrations.

Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly-sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his seduction meticulously. He sets the scene with infinite care -- but it doesn't come off quite as Charles expects.

A collection of five stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results. Contents: - Introduction: Thinkability - Bujak and the Strong Force or God's Dice - Insight at Flame Lake - The Time Disease - The Little Puppy That Could - The Immortals

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 by the author of London Fields. 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.

Martin Amis's short stories make his novels look prim, They are also more frankly satirical. Whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay (apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community); in 'Career Moves', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janitor on Mars', a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. Largely absent in the novels, the middle classes get a showing in 'Let Me Count the Times', where a man has a mad affair with himself. 'Heavy Water' portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, 'State of England' its weird resuscitation. And in 'The Coincidence of the Arts' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler. The earliest story, 'Denton's Death', was first published in 1975, but the bulk of the collection can be firmly labelled 'most recent work'.

A collection of short stories of the author including In the Place of the End and The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, and essays and reviews.

She wakes in an emergency room in a London hospital, to a voice that tells her: "You're on your own now. Take care. Be good." She has no knowledge of her name, her past, or even her species. It takes her a while to realize that she is human — and that the beings who threaten, befriend, and violate her are other people. Some of whom seem to know all about her.In this eerie, blackly funny, and sometimes disorienting novel, Martin Amis gives us a mystery that is as ambitious as it is intriguing, an investigation of a young woman's violent extinction that also traces her construction of a new and oddly innocent self.

Lionel Asbo - a very violent but not very successful young criminal - is going about his morning duties in a London prison when he learns that he has just won �139,999,999.50 on the National Lottery. This is not necessarily good news for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Des Pepperdine, who still has reason to fear his uncle's implacable vengeance. Savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant, Lionel Asbo is a modern fairytale from one of the world's great writers.

Two sombre stories from "Einstein's Monsters". One is about a middle-aged Pole living in Ladbroke Grove whose wife is murdered in their flat while he's away for the weekend. The second is a strange tale about a puppy and a human community in a post-apocalyptic world.

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. This title is about one such liaison.

Detective Mike Hoolihan, an American policewoman, begins to investigate the suspicious death of a police colleague's daughter, a girl too blessed in looks, love and intelligence to commit suicide. As Mike probes further into Jennifer's life and death, she has to ask, "If not who, then why?"

The girls are acting like boys and the boys are going on acting like boys. Keith Nearing - a bookish twenty-year-old, in that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven - is on holiday and struggling to twist feminism towards his own ends. Torn between three women, his scheming doesn't come off quite as he expects.

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; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Royce Traynor, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zizhen; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King.

A collection of essays on America by the author of London Fields, Money and Yellow Dog.At the age of ten, when Martin Amis spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, he was excited and frightened by America. As an adult he has approached that confusing country from many arresting angles, and interviewed its literati, filmmakers, thinkers, opinion makers, leaders and crackpots with characteristic discernment and wit.Included in a gallery of Great American Novelists are Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Paul Theroux, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Amis also takes us to Dallas, where presidential candidate Ronald Reagan is attempting to liaise with born-again Christians. We glimpse the beau monde of Palm Beach, where each couple tries to out-Gatsby the other, and examine the case of Claus von Bulow. Steven Spielberg gets a visit, as does Brian de Palma, whom Amis asks why his films make no sense, and Hugh Hefner's sybaritic fortress and sanitised image are penetrated.There can be little that escapes the eye of Martin Amis when his curiosity leads him to a subject, and America has found in him a superlative chronicler.

„Amis’ Erzählungen – eine schrill komische Lektion in Sachen Wirklichkeit – sind mit ihrer Lust an der gezielten Gemeinheit und mit ihrem unübertroffenen Gespür für den O-Ton von Underdogs souveräne Satiren.“Die limitierte Sonderausgabe enthält die Short Storys »Handys satt« und »Lass zählen mich die Liebe« aus dem Band «Schweres Wasser und andere Erzählungen» (2000), übersetzt von Joachim Kalka.

Alle Beiträge, die dieses Buch versammelt, wurden in den ersten zweieinhalb Wochen nach dem 11. September geschrieben. Sie sind unter dem unmittelbaren Eindruck der Terroranschläge auf das World Trade Center und das Pentagon in Washington entstanden und verbinden sehr persönliche Berichte mit dem Bemühen, das unbegreifliche zu verstehen. Gemeinsam dokumentieren sie die erste Reaktion auf ein Geschehen, nach dem die westliche Welt nicht mehr dieselbe ist wie zuvor.§Eine Reihe der Texte wurde bereits in deutschen und internationalen Zeitungen und Zeitschriften publiziert; die übrigen Beiträge entstanden auf Bitten des Verlags. Einige Autoren von bereits publizierten Texten haben ihre Beiträge für die Buchfassung leicht überarbeitet oder uns ausführlichere Versionen zur Verfügung gestellt.

Auslöser für Martin Amis’ bisher persönlichstes Werk war der Tod seines engsten Freundes Christopher Hitchens. Aus der tiefen und weitreichenden Freundschaft der beiden Schriftsteller entfaltet sich dieser autobiografische Roman. Christopher Hitchens war Martin Amis’ Mitstreiter und Berater, seit ihren Anfängen in London bis hin zu den Jahren des Literatur- Klatsches, der romantischen Verwicklungen und beunruhigenden Obsessionen. Während Inside Story auch anderen wichtigen Personen in Amis’ Leben nachspürt – darunter seinem Vater Kingsley Amis, seinem Idol Saul Bellow und dem Dichter Philip Larkin –, widmet sich die Geschichte zärtlich und humorvoll den schwierigsten Fragen: Wie lebt, wie trauert und wie stirbt man? Das Ergebnis ist ein Liebesbrief an das Leben, der Einblicke in die außergewöhnliche Welt des Schriftstellers eröffnet.

Het leven van een nazi-arts, die na de oorlog heeft weten ontvluchten, wordt achterstevoren verteld.

Martin Amis porträtiert mit unnachahmlicher Offenheit Salman Rushdie, Steven Spielberg oder Donald Trump, schreibt mit frischer Leichtigkeit über Kafka oder Cervantes, immer brillant über die schwarzen Löcher und toten Winkel unserer Gesellschaft. Seine Stimme bekommt eine sentimentale Tiefe, wenn er von der Königsfamilie erzählt, er begleitet Tony Blair zu Angela Merkel, beobachtet das gleichzeitige Heranströmen von Oktoberfestbesuchern und Flüchtlingen in München, schreibt mit sprachlicher Schärfe über nukleare Aufrüstung und den Krieg gegen das Klischee, stets die Zwischenräume, Auslassungen und Verzerrungen unseres Denkens im Blick. Martin Amis nimmt einen in seinen Texten mit, als wären es Abenteuer, die man am besten zu zweit genießt.

'It is a horrorshow story ...' Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is…