The myth of the happy hooker Nov 21, 2009
When Belle de Jour's daintily scurrilous blog was collected into a hit book, several critics noted that she had a command of language comparable to that of Martin Amis. Perhaps Belle de Jour was really Salman Rushdie. (BBC News -- UK)
Last word - Nabokov's final book Nov 21, 2009
The novelist Martin Amis, in his review of the book in the British newspaper the Guardian, described the Original of Laura as "a longish short story struggling to become a novella". Business. (BBC News -- Europe)
* How the bookshop chain killed bookselling Nov 13, 2009
Today, the worry is that the demise of the NBA has meant there is no new generation of British literary talent to follow the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. Theres been a slow bonfire of literary authors in the last 18 months, Hamilton says. (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World)
BBC Two signs Lord Bragg Nov 12, 2009
Drama Money, based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, will star Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz actor Nick Frost. And Lambing Live, with Kate Humble, "will track the life and death drama of lambing week". (BBC News -- Entertainment)
What Are Web Surfers Seeking? Well, It's Just What You'd Think Nov 1, 2009
Indeed, there were no searches at all for such modern masters as Malcolm Lowry, Martin Amis and Lee Gomes. Data aside, reading these queries is like listening in on random phone calls; even if you don't know who is talking, the experience can be wrenching. (Yahoo News -- Online Privacy)
Jane Austen meets Sex and the City Oct 19, 2009
Martin Amis had it right when he noted that in his 1995 version of P&P Andrew Davies had been shrewd enough to regard his function as one of artistic midwifery to get the thing out of the page and on to the screen in as undamaged a state as possible. Aldous Huxley s 1940 version, Amis added, was cold proof that any tampering will reduce the original to emollient inconsequentiality. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Opinion)
Let us now praise: The cliche Oct 18, 2009
And in 2001 Martin Amis officially declared war against clich. with a book entitled, uh, The War Against Clich. (Boston Globe)
The Wonderfully Weird Books You Find at Country Inns Oct 11, 2009
Remember this: The fancier the lodgings, the schlockier the shelves, a rule that follows from an observation on in-flight reading made by Martin Amis in. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. (Slate)
Hollywood's Favorite Rapist Oct 3, 2009
He thought everyone wanted to do what he did, as he proclaimed in an interview with novelist Martin Amis in 1979: "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But ... f---ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f--- young girls. Juries want to f--- young girls. Everyone wants to f--- young girls!". But as more than one Catholic leader has observed, what if his name were Father Roman Polanski. (Human Events Online)
After 208 Years, Is Britain's Observer Near the End? Sep 23, 2009
" Those noble aims were never extended to the Observer after it joined the GMG stable 16 years ago. As executives considered the group's deteriorating finances GMG reported a pre-tax loss of 89.8 million ($147 million) for 2008-09, with the division that houses the Observer and the Guardian hemorrhaging 36.8 million ($60.3 million), compared with a loss of 26.4 million ($43.2 million) a year earlier, on turnover of 253.6 million ($415.3 million) the idea of effectively killing the Observer... (Time.com)
* Hardcover: UK: Nick Caves Bunny Munro: all mouth and trousers Sep 20, 2009
Like one of Martin Amis early characters X Keith Talent, say, from London Fields X Bunny is an antihero of epic proportions, a booze-addled, nicotine-stained, cocaine-fuelled monster constantly in search of priapic adventure. Or what he, in a moment of not untypical lyrical invention, calls the fucking Valhalla of all vaginas. (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World Business)
* The rise of anti-Muslim xenophobia Aug 21, 2009
The Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, whom Martin Amis has hailed as a great sayer of the unsayable, does not hesitate to spell it out in his bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. In a democratic age, you cant buck demography X except through civil war. (Taipei Times, Taiwan -- World Business)
Porn: Just Another Business? Jul 17, 2009
Take the case of a true pervert, Paul Little, who calls himself "Max Hardcore." The British author Martin Amis submerged himself in the sleaziest subcultures of sex on film for the British newspaper The Guardian a few years ago. He recalled the making of Little's "Hollywood Hardcore 13." The film included a series of. (Townhall.com)
Book Reviews Jul 5, 2009
The Second Plane by Martin Amis This incendiary collection of short stories and articles smolders like the rubble of the twin towers. Taking on fundamentalism, Islamism in particular, as well as the West, in absorbing, dialectic prose he scores a direct hit against victim and victors alike. (Asia Times Online)
What Are Web Surfers Seeking? Well, It's Just What You'd Think Jul 5, 2009
Indeed, there were no searches at all for such modern masters as Malcolm Lowry, Martin Amis and Lee Gomes. Data aside, reading these queries is like listening in on random phone calls; even if you don't know who is talking, the experience can be wrenching. (Yahoo News -- Online Privacy)
Life By the Horns Jun 1, 2009
Stanley wrote this long ago, but he could have been writing about Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis or any of the effete writers of today. Moreover and this particularly appealed to me about Papa heroism was something that belonged to men. (The American Conservative)
Fiction review: 'The Cardboard Universe' May 19, 2009
He has written the funniest book of the year - perhaps of the decade - which also happens to be the most profound metaphysical inquiry into the status of the writer in relation to his readers, his critics, his market, his personality, his limits, his phobias and his innocence that I have ever read, leaving Martin Amis and Philip Roth's speculations in the dust. "The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank" is the faux-biography to test all "real" biographies against, as our... (San Francisco Chronicle)
Book Review Money by Martin Amis May 17, 2009
Book Review Money by Martin Amis. Book Review Money by Martin Amis ... Martin Amis has a strong wit, but it gets the best of him more often than not. (Suite101.com)
From Venice to Varanasi Apr 13, 2009
You can spot Dyer s antecedents and influences Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Thomas Bernhard, Milan Kundera, John Berger, Martin Amis but not his literary children, because his work is so restlessly various that it moves somewhere else before it can gather a family. He combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. (New Yorker)
Don't ask Anne Michaels what she had for breakfast Apr 4, 2009
She also joined Martin Amis, Philip Roth, the Vladimir Nabokov estate, Salman Rushdie and Tipper Gore in being represented by the world's most famous literary agent, Andrew Wylie, nicknamed "the Jackal.". But, in a sense, all this has just been so much marking time for The Winter Vault, which after its publication in Canada, England, Germany, Norway, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and the United States this spring will make its way into bookstores in Greece and Finland, Japan, Italy, Brazil... (Globe and Mail -- Entertainment)
Loitering with literary intent Feb 28, 2009
This is the shop that Alan Bennett launched in 2003 and where literary luminaries such as Martin Amis and John Lanchester are reputed to loiter. It was five o'clock on a cold December evening and night had fallen already when I arrived. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
McEwan offered sanctuary to Rushdie Feb 16, 2009
IN THE folklore of English letters, the literary friendship between the four dominant voices of the modern British novel - Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes - is the stuff of legend. That was even before we learned that for two of them the bond extended to offering safe haven against the threat of state-sponsored assassins. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
An outlaw comic finally gets his final say Feb 8, 2009
Calling something offensive is like, as reported by Martin Amis, Truman Capote gossiping aimlessly of someone: Oh, her, she's a real throw-up number. It is an opinion, and an oppressive one at that. (Globe and Mail -- Entertainment)
Praise for Updike, man of letters Feb 8, 2009
Fellow English author Martin Amis said news of the writer's death heralded "a very cold day for literature". Updike published at least a dozen short-story collections and 25 novels and won two Pulitzers for works that chronicled the drama of small-town American life. (Sydney Morning Herald -- Entertainment)
