Showing results by author "Martin Amis" in All Categories

John Self is addicted to life. Porn freak and jetsetter, a aficionado of wealth and women, Self is the shameless heir to a fast-food culture where money beats out an insistent invitation to futile self-gratification. Out in New York, mingling with the mighty, making a fortune but spending more, Self is embroiled in the corruption, the brutality and the obscenity of the money conspiracy.

The story of John Self and his insatiable appetite for money, alcohol, drugs, porn, and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, it is a tale of life lived without restraint, of money and the disasters it can precipitate.

A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers 14 pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative, and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time.

The murderee is Nicola Six, a 'black hole' of sex and self-loathing who is intend on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honourable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. And as Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London - and, indeed, the whole world - seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.

Martin Amis turns to a tricky literary conceit to tell the story of an ex-Nazi, Dr. Tod T. Friendly. Friendly is possessed of two separate voices, one running backward from his death, the other running forward, fleeing his unsavory past.

What happens when we discover who we really are? And how do we come to terms with it? Can we even meet each other's eye, after we have seen who we really are? Fearless and original, The Zone of Interest is a violently dark love story set against a backdrop of unadulterated evil, and a vivid journey into the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

How can one writer hurt another where it really counts? The answer: attack his reputation. This is the problem facing novelist Richard Tull, contemplating the success of his friend and rival Gwyn Barry. Revenger's tragedy, comedy of errors, contemporary satire - The Information skewers high life and low in Martin Amis's brilliant return to the territory of Money and London Fields.

Time's Arrow tells the story, backwards, of the life of Nazi war criminal, Doctor Tod T. Friendly. He dies and then feels better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home.

Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A 15-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But this one case has gotten under her skin. When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career, now top-brass, cop takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it … especially her father, Colonel Tom. Mike Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of the Colonel, 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, price and pride are brought to a low by the hidden recesses of our humanity.

It was summer 1970 – a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing – twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel – is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends.

From the celebrated author of London Fields come these 8 unforgettable and imaginative short stories. "Career Move" is a through-the-looking glass romp in a world where poets are top dogs fawned over by executives and paid handsomely for their work, while screenwriters are domed to near-obscurity.