Heavy Water And Other Stories

Description

In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janitor of Mars', a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. In 'Let Me Count the Times' a man has a mad affair with himself. 'Heavy Water, portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, and 'State of England' its weird resuscitation. And in 'The Coincidence of the Arts' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler.

Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time's Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. He lives in New York.

Brilliant - a remarkable feat of rhetorical beauty and overwhelming truth... A terrific collection - brilliantly varied, constantly surprising chips of a superb imagination * Mail on Sunday * Amis is immaculate as a comic stylist - irresistible * Daily Telegraph * This volume is essential reading for anyone remotely interested in where we are and how we got here * Sunday Times * Comic inversions, fantastical celebrations and ripe satire - of popular culture, personal relationships, even the space-time continuum - all jostle in these pages... Simply ace * Esquire * Amis applies his comic timing, his perfect pitch and his curatorial eye to some of the burning issues of our time * New York Times Book Review *