Martin Amis
Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949) is an English novelist and son of Kingsley Amis.
His first novel The Rachel Papers (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974), is about the adventures of a bright, egotistical teenager (presumably not unlike Amis himself) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to University. It is the most traditional of his novels, and still the favourite of some, though it has since been made into a rather unsuccessful film.
Dead Babies, more flippant in tone, has a typically Sixties plot, with a house full of characters who abuse various substances and are eventually massacred by a psychopath. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000 which was also unsuccessful.
His most famous novels are Money, Time's Arrow and London Fields. The unparalleled size of the advance demanded and obtained by Amis for The Information attracted what Amis described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics; ironically, the main characters in The Information are rival authors who are jealous of various aspects of each other's lives. He has written a biography and memoir on his father called Experience. In 2002, to much literary controversy he published Koba the Dread, a book about Stalinism and the intellectual left.
In 2003, Yellow Dog was denounced in intemperate terms as worthless by Tibor Fischer, generating a further hubbub in the media.
Martin Amis has released a collection of his short stories, under the title Heavy Water, and a collection of journalism entitled The War On Cliche.
He lives and writes in London and Uruguay.
Bibliography
Novels
- The Rachel Papers (1973)
- Dead Babies (1975)
- Success (1978)
- Other People (1981)
- Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
- London Fields (1989)
- Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991)
- The Information (1995)
- Night Train (1997)
- Yellow Dog (2003)
Collections
- Einstein's Monsters (1987)
- Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993)
- Two Stories (1994)
- God's Dice (1995)
- Heavy Water: And Other Stories (1998)
- State of England: And Other Stories (1998)
- Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)
- The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)
- Vintage Amis (2004)
Non fiction
- Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982)
- The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986)
- Experience (2000)
- The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (2001)
- Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002)
