Martin Amis's short stories make his novels look prim. They are also more frankly satirical. Whole words are created - or inverted. In "Straight Fiction", everyone is gay (apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community); in "Career Moves", screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in "The Janitor on Mars", a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. Largely absent in the novels, the middle classes get a showing in "Let Me Count the Times", where a man has had a mad affair with himself. "Heavy Water", portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, "State of England" its weird resuscitation. And in "The Coincidence of the Arts" an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler. The earliest story, "Denton's Death", was first published in 1975, but the bulk of the collection can be firmly labelled 'most recent work'.
| ISBN | 0099272660 | | DEWEY edition | DC21 | | ISBN13 | 9780099272663
(What's this?) | | Pages | 240 | | Publisher | Vintage | | Weight (grammes) | 204 | | Imprint | Vintage | | Published in | London | | Format | Paperback | | Height (mm) | 199 | | Publication date | 03 Jun 1999 | | Width (mm) | 132 | | Non-book description | B | | Spine width (mm) | 16 | | DEWEY | 823.914 | | Academic level | General |
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"Amis applies his comic timing, his perfect pitch and his curatorial eye to some of the burning issues of our time." --"The New York Times Book Review" "Martin Amis is a force unto himself. . . . There is, quite simply, no one else like him." --"The Washington Post"
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