Martin Amis

J. G. Ballard

A thrilling adventure with “an oppressive power reminiscent of Conrad” (Kingsley Amis), considered by many to be Ballard's finest.

The Drowned World

On the eve of his twentieth birthday, Charles Highway reviews his campaign to win over a self-assured girl named Rachel

The Rachel Papers

A searing portrait of life and unexpected love in a concentration camp explores the depths and contradictions of the human soul as well as the capacity of individuals who are tested to acknowledge their true selves. By the author of Time's Arrow. 50,000 first printing.

The Zone of Interest

Writer, Samson Young, is staring death in the face, and not only his own. Void of ideas and on the verge of terminal decline, Samson’s dash to a decaying, degenerate London has brought him through the doors of the Black Cross pub and into a murder story just waiting to be narrated. At its centre is the mesmeric, doomed Nicola Six, destined to be murdered on her 35th birthday. Around her: the disreputable men who might yet turn out to be her killer. All Samson has to do is to write Nicola’s story as it happens, and savour in this one last gift that life has granted him. 'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent

London Fields

A female detective named Mike Hoolihan investigates the murder of her commanding officer's daughter, whose death was staged to look like a suicide

Night Train

Compiles essays discussing, and in some cases condemning, such people and topics as movie violence, Margaret Thatcher, Charles Dickens, Michael Crichton, Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, poker, and world literature. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000

The War Against Cliché

To this tantalizing nonfiction collection Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London's darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw. These essays by Martin Amis provide portraits of contemporaries and mentors: Larkin and Rushdie, Burgess, Ballard, Nicholson Baker and John Updike. From across the Atlantic, he exposes the double-think of nuke-speak in Washington and the dementia of a Republican convention in New Orleans. And then there is sport. Checking out darts' disastrous attempt to clean itself up, Amis sneaks tips from the world number one, and witnesses the sad and sudden decline of Keith Deller. An account of dirty tricks in world chess reveals, "It's not an art. It's a fight." And so it is when he takes on the snooker savvy of Julian "Barometer" Barnes, or indulges in some brisk, but vicious poker with Al Alvarez and David Mamet. "Sex" without Madonna, expulsion from school, the Notting Hill Carnival, a Stones gig that should have been gagged - it's all here, as well as on set with Robocop or set-down with Sabatini.

And Other Excursions

Visiting Mrs Nabokov

While simultaneously shooting his first feature film in New York and living a decadent lifestyle, John Self, one of London's top commercial directors, discovers how distasteful the pursuit of pleasure can be.

A Suicide Note

Money

'Martin Amis is a seriously good writer, and never on better form than now. Experience, the book of his life, may be the book of his life' Daily Telegraph **ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY** In this remarkable work of autobiography, the son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final one of his death. Amis also reflects on the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 and was exhumed twenty years later from the basement of Frederick West, one of Britain's most prolific serial murderers.

Experience

Or the Nature of the Offense

Time's Arrow

Saul Bellow

Modern Classics Humboldts Gift

The 1960s, saw the launch of sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution, contingent and sanguinary.

Inside History

The Pregnant Widow

Relates the tale of two brothers and a Jewish girl in a Russian slave labor camp in 1946.

House of Meetings

The sequel to the author's acclaimed memoir Experience describes the role of communism in mid-twentieth-century thought and its influence on his own family as he reflects on Stalin, his impact on the Soviet Union, and his legacy. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Laughter and the Twenty Million

Koba the Dread

Martin Amis's dazzling autobiographical novel of a unique literary life seen through the lens of friendships, family, sex and love, is wise, warm, heartbreaking and funny: the heart-to-heart testimony of an incomparable writer. This is the portrait of an extraordinary life lived by a great writer. Martin Amis leads us through boisterous romantic entanglements and literary friendships, the encompassing ties of family to generously revealing details about how to write (from the master of prose style), and finally to the intimate sorrow of a death closely felt. Inside Story had its birth in a death--that of the author's closest friend, the beloved thinker and writer Christopher Hitchens. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic conquests and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books and where to lunch), Hitchens was Martin's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral, unforgettable Phoebe Phelps--an obsession Martin must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness. We meet the literary giants who influenced him--his father Kingsley Amis, his hero Saul Bellow, the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin, and significant literary women, from Iris Murdoch to Elizabeth Jane Howard. Moving among these greats to set his own path, Martin's quest is a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to be a husband and father, how to grieve, and how to die? In his search for answers, he surveys the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of 9/11 on the twenty-first, and considers what all this has taught him about how to be a writer. The result is a love letter to life and to the people in his life, which is simultaneously a wonder of literary invention--wise, meditative, heartbreaking, funny, and as engaging as a novel--that achieves a new level of confidentiality with readers.

Inside Story

House of meetings

and Other Stories

Heavy Water

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 sanitized 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.

Martin Amis

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