The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1991-04-12
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780140127195

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.

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2011-01-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307777790

A tantalizing collection of classic essays from one of the most gifted writers of his generation. • "The brainy, sarcastic, tender intelligence at the center of these pieces can make you laugh out loud: they can also move you to tears." —People 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. 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." "His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity." —John Updike

The Pregnant Widow

The Pregnant Widow
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2010-05-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307593576

The year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the chaotic, ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though blindly dedicated to the cause, its nubile foot soldiers have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory—or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow. Keith Nearing is stuck in an exquisite limbo. Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long, hot summer in a castle in Italy. The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith’s subsequent love life for decades to come. Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change.

Anti-Americanism and the American World Order

Anti-Americanism and the American World Order
Author: Giacomo Chiozza
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2009-07-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801892066

News stories remind us almost daily that anti-American opinion is rampant in every corner of the globe. Journalists, scholars, and politicians alike reinforce the perception that anti-Americanism is an entrenched sentiment in many foreign countries. Political scientist Giacomo Chiozza challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that foreign public opinion about the U.S. is much more diverse and nuanced than is generally believed. Chiozza examines the character, source, and persistence of foreign attitudes toward the United States. His findings are based on worldwide public opinion databases that surveyed anti-American sentiment in Islamic countries, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and East Asia. Data compiled from responses in a wide range of categories -- including politics, wealth, science and technology, popular culture, and education -- indicate that anti-American sentiments vary widely across these geographic regions. Through careful analyses, Chiozza shows how foreign publics balance the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the U.S. in their own perceptions of the country. He finds that popular anti-Americanism is mostly benign and shallow; deep-seated ideological opposition to the U.S. is usually held among a minority of groups. More often, Chiozza explains, foreigners have conflicting attitudes toward the U.S. He finds that while anti-Americanism certainly exists, the United States is equally praised as a symbol of democracy and freedom, its ideals of liberty, equality, and opportunity applauded. Chiozza clearly demonstrates that what is reported as undisputed fact -- that various groups abhor American values -- is in reality a complex story. -- Lisa Blaydes

Observing America

Observing America
Author: Robert Frankel
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2007-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 029921883X

Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville and Frances Trollope, visitors to America have written some of the most penetrating and, occasionally, scathing commentaries on U.S. politics and culture. Observing America focuses on four of the most insightful British commentators on America between 1890 and 1950. The colorful journalist W. T. Stead championed Anglo-American unity while plunging into reform efforts in Chicago. The versatile writer H. G. Wells fiercely criticized capitalist America but found reason for hope in the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. G. K. Chesterton, one of England’s great men of letters, urged Americans to preserve the vestiges of Jeffersonian democracy that he still discerned in the small towns of the heartland. And the influential political theorist and activist Harold Laski assailed the business ethos that he believed dominated the nation, especially after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Robert Frankel examines the New World experiences of these commentators and the books they wrote about America. He also probes similar writings by other prominent observers from the British Isles, including Beatrice Webb, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. The result is a book that offers keen insights into America’s national identity in a time of vast political and cultural change.

Other People

Other People
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2010-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307497186

"One of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME) gives us a metaphysical literary 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. 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. "Powerful and electrifying.... Other People is a metaphysical thriller, Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho." —J. G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun

The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story

The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story
Author: Andrew Maunder
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816074968

A comprehensive reference to short fiction from Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth. With approximately 450 entries, this A-to-Z guide explores the literary contributions of such writers as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D H Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Martin Amis, and others.

Martin Amis

Martin Amis
Author: Nick Bentley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2015
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0746311788

Nick Bentley offers a critical analysis to the main themes and literary techniques of Martin Amis, a leading literary figure who has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive literary style.

Join the Revolution, Comrade

Join the Revolution, Comrade
Author: Charles Foran
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1897231725

In Join the Revolution, Comrade, Charles Foran brings to the essay form the same restlessness and originality that mark his novels and non-fiction. Foran visits places in Vietnam that have been 'colonized' by western war films, talks to Shanghai residents about their colossal city and commiserates with the people of Bali about the effects of terrorist bombs on their island. In Beijing he looks up old friends he had known back in 1989 during the days before and after the June 4th massacre. "Join the revolution, Comrade," a friend had loved to say, quoting a line from a Bertolucci film. Foran also 'encounters' Miguel de Cervantes, the Buddha of Compassion, and the pumped-up American Tom Wolfe. He maps the geography of Canadian literature and pinpoints the 'inner-Newfoundland' of Wayne Johnston. He defends the novel against those who would tame it and uses an ancient Chinese philosopher to explain how one imagination -- his own-- works. Whether exploring the waterways of Thailand or the streets of his childhood in suburban Toronto, meditating on raising children in post-9/11 Asia or the music of good prose, Charles Foran's writing is fresh, alert, and free of convention.

A Dictionary of Writers and their Works

A Dictionary of Writers and their Works
Author: Christopher Riches
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1431
Release: 2015-01-29
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 019251850X

Over 3,200 entries An essential guide to authors and their works that focuses on the general canon of British literature from the fifteenth century to the present. There is also some coverage of non-fiction such as biographies, memoirs, and science, as well as inclusion of major American and Commonwealth writers. This online-exclusive new edition adds 60,000 new words, including over 50 new entries dealing with authors who have risen to prominence in the last five years, as well as fully updating the entries that currently exist. Each entry provides details of a writer's nationality and birth/death dates, followed by a listing of their titles arranged chronologically by date of publication.