One of the finest essayists of all time with an essential collection of essays looking at our times.
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.
The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and
unafraid... He is sweetly sentimental when it comes to the British
royal family (why?), funny about tennis, always brilliant about the
body, scorching in his refusal of death, its sorrows and
humiliations... He is a great believer in semantic rigour; every
sentence snaps with an accuracy that is fresh and fierce...
This collection is full of treasures. -- Anne Enright *
Guardian *
First-class... Amis reveres Vladimir Nabokov, and
wonderfully evokes the author's "miraculously fertile instability",
and the "dazed hymns to the bliss of existence"... Amis's wide
reading is prompted by pure pleasure and in this regard he is
proudly Kingsley's son... Amis's literary criticism is richly
enjoyable, his intellectual gifts are formidable and he is
worthy of the praise he shovels upon Nabokov in his prime... His
non-fiction is bayonet sharp... The Rub of Time is
impressive. The inner world of the old devil on display is
one to be treasured. -- Roger Lewis * The Times *
The reportage is some of the best stuff here. For someone who
often doesn't much seem to care for journalists, Amis is a very
good journalist indeed. If anyone has written a better, more
penetrating, more open-minded interview with John Travolta, for
example, I'd like to see it... When he puts his nose to a text,
close up, there are few readers like him... And his is
superbly good at capturing the nub of what's so interesting
in DeLillo, deftly sectioning the phases of JG Ballard's career,
tracing the weirdly wonky process of Philip Roth finding his voice
or summing up a mood in a glancing phrase. -- Sam Leith * Observer
*
Erudite, eclectic and entertaining, Amis's essays offer
serious assessments of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow alongside a
tour of the porn industry, an exemplary prolife of John Travolta
and a hilarious analysis of the hazards of being christened "Tim".
-- Claire Lowdon * Sunday Times, Book of the Year *
He is our sure-footed mountain guide, leading us gleefully from
one delight to the next in these quotation-rich encomiums.
"Panegyric is rightly regarded as the dullest of all literary
forms," he writes in Nabakov's Natural Selection, a
scintillating panegyric that absolutely achieves its stated aim...
The literary essays will leave you educated, enlightened,
entertained... I defy anyone not called Tim to get to the end
of the Henman-inspired essay, The Tims, without a helpless
guffaw... Martin Amis is a great writer and a great reader.
-- Claire Lowdon * Sunday Times *
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