One of the finest writers of our time turns his razor sharp wit to the US elections, pornography celebrity culture and a brief history of the name Tim.
Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century - in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience - he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.
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.
*Guardian*
First-class… Amis reveres Vladimir Nabokov, and wonderfully evokes
the author’s “miraculously fertile instability”, and the “dazed
hymns to the bliss of existence”… Amis’s wide reading is prompted
by pure pleasure and in this regard he is proudly Kingsley’s son…
Amis’s literary criticism is richly enjoyable, his intellectual
gifts are formidable and he is worthy of the praise he shovels upon
Nabokov in his prime… His non-fiction is bayonet sharp… The Rub of
Time is impressive. The inner world of the old devil on display is
one to be treasured.
*The Times*
The reportage is some of the best stuff here. For someone who often
doesn’t much seem to care for journalists, Amis is a very good
journalist indeed. If anyone has written a better, more
penetrating, more open-minded interview with John Travolta, for
example, I’d like to see it… When he puts his nose to a text, close
up, there are few readers like him… And his is superbly good at
capturing the nub of what’s so interesting in DeLillo, deftly
sectioning the phases of JG Ballard’s career, tracing the weirdly
wonky process of Philip Roth finding his voice or summing up a mood
in a glancing phrase.
*Observer*
Erudite, eclectic and entertaining, Amis’s essays offer serious
assessments of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow alongside a tour of
the porn industry, an exemplary prolife of John Travolta and a
hilarious analysis of the hazards of being christened "Tim".
*Sunday Times, Book of the Year*
He is our sure-footed mountain guide, leading us gleefully from one
delight to the next in these quotation-rich encomiums. “Panegyric
is rightly regarded as the dullest of all literary forms,” he
writes in Nabakov’s Natural Selection, a scintillating panegyric
that absolutely achieves its stated aim… The literary essays will
leave you educated, enlightened, entertained… I defy anyone not
called Tim to get to the end of the Henman-inspired essay, The
Tims, without a helpless guffaw… Martin Amis is a great writer and
a great reader.
*Sunday Times*
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