Kingsley Amis

'I suppose it was conceited of me. But it was fun. And I felt like getting a bit of my own back on some of the people who'd conned and flattered me into wasting all those years.' In this wry, piercing short story from one of the greatest of all British postwar writers, an ageing poet considers the value of his art � and of the critics who�ve found genius in it. Then, with his final work, he exercises a unique revenge . . .

Dear Illusion

Infamous Millimetre

When he published his first novel, Lucky Jim, in which his misbehaving hero wreaks havoc with the starchy protocols of academic life, Kingsley Amis emerged as a bad boy of British letters. Later he became famous as another kind of bad boy, an inveterate boozer, a red-faced scourge of political correctness. He was consistent throughout in being a committed enemy of any presumed “right thinking,” and it is this, no doubt, that made him one of the most consistently unconventional and exploratory writers of his day, a master of classical English prose who was at the same time altogether unafraid to apply himself to literary genres all too often dismissed by sophisticates as “low.” Science fiction, the spy story, the ghost story were all grist for Amis's mill, and nowhere is the experimental spirit in which he worked, his will to test both reality and the reader's imagination, more apparent than in his short stories. These “woodchips from [his] workshop”—here presented in a new selection—are anything but throwaway work. They are instead the essence of Amis, a brew that is as tonic as it is intoxicating.

Dear Illusion

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