Martin Amis Books In Order

The Rachel Papers

In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable and curiously touching adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.

Dead Babies

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.

Success

In Success Amis pens a mismatched pair of foster brothers one ‘a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude,’ the other a ‘bundle of contempt, vanity and stock response’ in a single London flat. He binds them with ties of class hatred, sexual rivalry, and disappointed love, and throws in a disloyal girlfriend and a spectacularly unstable sister to create a modern day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry.

Other People

What an amnesiac young woman discovers about her violently erased past is only one of the riddles in this eerie, blackly funny, and sometimes disorienting novel by the author of London Fields. Amis offers a revealing look at how someone with no memory constructs a self in a dangerous world.

Money

Po*rn 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.

London Fields

London Fields is Amis’s murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a ‘black hole’ of sex and self loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are po*rnography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?

Time’s Arrow

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 toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.’The narrative moves with irresistible momentum…
. Amis is a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art.’ NewsdayFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

The Information

Martin Amis is at his savage best in this magnificent novel of literary envy. In The Information, the best selling author of London Fields and Time’s Arrow has written a totally mesmerizing and thoroughly entertaining novel that puts all of his extraordinary talents on display. ‘I’ve always thought of Martin Amis as the literary Mick Jagger of my generation.’ Christopher Buckley, Washington Times.

Night Train

Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen year veteran of the force, she’s gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case this case has gotten under her skin. When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop now top brass takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Detective Mike Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to ‘put the case down.’ Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look. Not since his celebrated novel Money has Amis turned his focus on America to such remarkable effect. Fusing brilliant wordplay with all the elements of a classic whodunit, Amis exposes a world where surfaces are suspect no matter how perfect, where paranoia is justified no matter how pervasive, and where power and pride are brought low by the hidden recesses of our humanity.

Yellow Dog

Brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny as hell, Yellow Dog is Martin Amis highly anticipated first novel in seven years and a stunning return to the fictional form. 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; and the po*rno tycoon, Cora Susan. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen year old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed intrusion that rivets the world because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog. If, in the 21st century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. Yellow Dog is a model of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation. But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion that we can protect our future and our progeny. Meo heard no footsteps; what he heard was the swish, the shingly soft shoe of the hefted sap. Then the sharp two finger prod on his shoulder. It wasn t meant to happen like this. They expected him to turn and he didn t turn he half turned, then veered and ducked. So the blow intended merely to break his cheekbone or his jawbone was instead received by the cranium, that spacey bulge in this instance still quite marriageably forested where so many delicate and important powers are so trustingly encased. He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat…
. from Yellow DogFrom the Hardcover edition.

House of Meetings

An extraordinary novel that ratifies Martin Amis’s standing as a force unto himself, as The Washington Post has attested: There is, quite simply, no one else like him.

House of Meetings is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.

Harrowing, endlessly surprising, epic in breadth yet intensely intimate, House of Meetings reveals once again that Amis is a stone solid genius…
a dazzling star of wit and insight The Wall Street Journal.

The Pregnant Widow

A riotous, bitingly funny, and supremely clever novel from one of our most distinctive voices in the English language. The year is 1970, and Keith Nearing, a twenty year old literature student, is spending his summer vacation in a castle on a mountainside in Italy. The Sexual Revolution is in full swing a historical moment of unprecedented opportunity and Keith and his friends are immediately caught up in its chaotic, ecstatic throes. Yet they soon discover a disturbing truth: between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of liminal purgatory, once described by the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen as a pregnant widow. As Amis deftly explores the repercussions and consequences of that one summer, he presents us with a precise and poignant portrait of the liberating possibilities, and the haunting consequences, of change. Expertly written and full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is Amis at his fearless best.

Einstein’s Monsters

A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.

Heavy Water and Other Stories

‘Martin Amis is a stone solid genius…
a dazzling star of wit and insight.’ The Wall Street JournalIn this wickedly delightful collection of stories, Martin Amis once again demonstrates why he is a modern master of the form. In ‘Career Move,’ screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In ‘Straight Fiction,’ the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire the opposite sex. And in ‘State of England,’ Mal, a former ‘minder to the superstars,’ discovers how to live in a country where ‘class and race and gender were supposedly gone.’In eavy Water and Other Stories, Amis astonishes us with the vast range of his talent, establishing that he is one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation.

Vintage Amis

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions. Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels. The Seattle TimesEqually at home in satirical novels and biting critical essays, wickedly funny short stories and intimate autobiography, Martin Amis is widely regarded as one of the most influential yet inimitable voices in contemporary fiction, a writer whose prose captures the warp speed rush of modernity. Vintage Amis displays this versatility in an excerpt from the author’s award winning memoir, Experience; the Horrorday chapter from London Fields; a vignette from his novel Money; the stories State of England, Insight at Flam Lake, and Coincidence of the Arts ; and the essays Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, Phantom of the Opera. Also included, for the first time in book form, the short story Po*rno s Last Summer.

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

With mixed feelings of wonder and trepidation, the brilliant British writer Martin Amis approaches America and introduces this sharp and thoroughly stimulating collection of ‘American’ pieces. From Claus von Bulow to the New Evangelists, little escapes Amis’ curiosity.

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov

To this tantalizing nonfiction collection Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompas*ses 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. Throughout, he offers razor sharp takes on such subjects as:American politics: ‘If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily dreamless: eight years of Do Not Disturb.’Chess: ‘Nowhere in sport, perhaps in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical…
. My chances of a chess brilliancy are the ‘chances’ of a lab chimp and a type writer producing King Lear.’

Experience

Martin Amis is perhaps the most gifted novelist of his generation. His prose refashions the English language into a lean and brillant instrument, dazzling readers with its energy and wit. His novels and short stories chart a world that is uniquely his: as John Updike puts it, ‘Amis is trying to construct a large, reaching, ambitious set of books trying to cover the world in fiction’. His celebrity as a novelist is also unique few writers have attracted such obsessive media attention. In this much anticipated memoir, Amis writes with striking candour about his life and looks intimately at the process of writing itself. As the son of a famous writer, the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley’s life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also examines the case of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without a trace in 1973 a month after the publication of his first novel, and was exhumed in 1994 from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain’s most prolific serial killer. Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, with many anecdotes and pen portraits. The result is a remarkable work of autobiography profound, witty,and ruthlessly honest. As a writer’s self portrait, it is destined to become a classic.

The War against Cliché

Martin Amis is perhaps the most gifted novelist of his generation. His prose refashions the English language into a lean and brillant instrument, dazzling readers with its energy and wit. His novels and short stories chart a world that is uniquely his: as John Updike puts it, ‘Amis is trying to construct a large, reaching, ambitious set of books trying to cover the world in fiction’. His celebrity as a novelist is also unique few writers have attracted such obsessive media attention. In this much anticipated memoir, Amis writes with striking candour about his life and looks intimately at the process of writing itself. As the son of a famous writer, the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley’s life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also examines the case of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without a trace in 1973 a month after the publication of his first novel, and was exhumed in 1994 from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain’s most prolific serial killer. Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, with many anecdotes and pen portraits. The result is a remarkable work of autobiography profound, witty,and ruthlessly honest. As a writer’s self portrait, it is destined to become a classic.

Koba the Dread

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a Comintern dogsbody as he would come to put it from 1941 to 1956. His second closest, and then his closest friend after the death of the poet Philip Larkin, was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere statistic. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin s aphorism. From the Hardcover edition.

Po*rnoland

‘Whatever po*rno is, whatever po*rno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: banish po*rno, 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 Po*rnoland, a strange, parallel universe where po*rnographic 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 encompas*ses 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.

The Second Plane

The English language bows deeper to Amis than anyone else. The Daily Telegraph UKA master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time. At the heart of this collection is the long essay Terror and Boredom, an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West’s flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran and Tony Blair s pallid departure from Downing Street. Amis s reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a wide ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: The Last Days of Mohammed Atta, and In the Palace of the End, narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant s double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts. Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his blunt common sense, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read informed, elegant, surprising and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with. From the Hardcover edition.

The Rub of Time

The English language bows deeper to Amis than anyone else. The Daily Telegraph UKA master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time. At the heart of this collection is the long essay Terror and Boredom, an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West’s flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran and Tony Blair s pallid departure from Downing Street. Amis s reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a wide ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: The Last Days of Mohammed Atta, and In the Palace of the End, narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant s double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts. Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his blunt common sense, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read informed, elegant, surprising and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with. From the Hardcover edition.

Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge

Kirkus Reviews called Splatterpunks ‘an authoritative and intelligent collection for horror fans willing to go all the way.’ Now, this second volume of taboo shattering horror stories and essays goes beyond the limits of convention into the darkest corners of the human soul.