Heavy Water And Other Stories

£5.495
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Heavy Water And Other Stories

Heavy Water And Other Stories

RRP: £10.99
Price: £5.495
£5.495 FREE Shipping

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As a youth, Amis, the son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, thrived literarily on a permissive home atmosphere and a “passionate street life. His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet "Blitcon" (British literary neoconservative) from Ziauddin Sardar, who labelled Amis as such in the New Statesman.

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. 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. Amis is also the author of several collections of essays, including The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), and The War Against Cliché (2001), which includes essays and book reviews. In 2015, Amis criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for The Sunday Times, describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated".His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. He gave his own explanation for the novel's critical failure: "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). In an interview with Newsnight 's Jeremy Paxman, Amis said the novel was "not a frowning examination of England" but a comedy based on a "fairytale world", adding that Lionel Asbo: State of England was not an attack on the country, insisting he was "proud of being English" and viewed the nation with affection. Like Hamza, Amis could only make his nonsense stand up with mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran.

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. To this tantalizing nonfiction collection Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing.The early stories (from the 1970's) are fairly consistently reviled, but every one of the others receives both praise and disparagement.

The story is set in a castle owned by a cheese tycoon in Campania, Italy, where Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old English literature student; his girlfriend, Lily; and her friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during the hot summer of 1970, the year that Amis says "something was changing in the world of men and women". As the New York Times puts it, its “rollicking, repulsive picture of London and New York in the late 20th century, awash in cash, corruption, pornography, junk food, junk art, self-promotion and wretched excess of every imaginable variety” was borne forth on a devastatingly effective overflow of virtuosic sentences. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives. Just as Amis once confessed (or boasted) that he stopped finding Madonna attractive when she went ‘hard-body’, so there are readers in good numbers who prefer something suppler in their sentences than articulated armour-plate and an almost arthropod vision of imaginative prose.

This dazzling, troubling work is a rhetorical and technical tour de force, but its very success in this regard – in its voicing of the unspeakable – opens the novel to accusations of opportunism and impropriety.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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