Amis, Martin: Inside Story (Paperback)

'Utterly compelling' Guardian

Life...is shapeless, it does not point to and gather round anything, it does not cohere. Artistically, it's dead. Life's dead.

So begins a love letter to life, a resuscitation of sorts, encountering vibrant characters from Saul Bellow, to Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated Amis' twenties, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps.

Amis addresses our burning questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die?

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century ¿ in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience ¿ he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.