Martin Louis Amis (born 25
August 1949) is an English
novelist, literary
critic, professor, and short story writer.
He is the son of
Sir Kingsley Amis.
His works include such novels as
Money (1984),
London Fields (1989) and
The Information
(1995). Amis's raw material is what he sees as the
absurdity and
caricatures of the
postmodern condition — he has thus sometimes
been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the
New York
Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
The Guardian writes that "all
his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a
'terrible compulsive vividness in his [Martin's] style ... that
constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true
that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before
he reaches his first full stop." In the words of one prominent
academic, he is the "leading luminary of the English metropolitan
literary world".
Early life
Amis was
born in Oxford
,
England. His father, Sir
Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk
from Clapham
; his mother,
Hilary Bardwell (Hilly), was the
daughter of a shoe millionaire. He had an older brother,
Philip, and a younger sister, Sally. Martin Amis's parents divorced
when he was twelve. Much later, Martin lived in a house with
Kingsley, Hilly, and Hilly's third husband,
Alistair Boyd, Lord
Kilmarnock. Amis has described it as "[s]omething out of early
Updike, '
Couples'
flirtations and a fair amount of drinking," he told
The New York Times. "They were all
'at it'."
He
attended a number of different schools in the 1950s and 1960s,
including Swansea Grammar
School
, and Cambridgeshire High School for
Boys
. The acclaim that followed Kingsley's first
novel Lucky Jim sent the family
to Princeton, New
Jersey
, where Kingsley lectured. This was Martin's
introduction to the United
States
.
Martin Amis read nothing but
comic books
until his stepmother, the novelist
Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him
to
Jane Austen, whom he often names as
his earliest influence.
After teenage years spent in flowery shirts
and a short spell at Westminster School
while living in Hampstead
, he graduated from Exeter
College, Oxford
with a "Congratulatory" First
in English — "the sort where you
are called in for a viva and the
examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your
papers."
After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at
The Times Literary
Supplement, and at age 27 became literary editor of
The New Statesman, where he
met
Christopher Hitchens, then
a feature writer for
The
Observer, who remains a close friend.
Early writing
According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no interest in
his son's work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped
and sent
Money twirling through the air; that's where the
character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking the rules,
buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself,"
Kingsley complained.
His first novel
The Rachel Papers (1973) won the
Somerset Maugham Award. The most
traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult
film, it tells the story of a bright,
egotistical teenager (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical)
and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year
before going to university.
He also wrote the screenplay for the film
Saturn 3, an experience which he was to draw
on for his fifth novel
Money.
Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, has a typically
"sixties" plot, with a house full of characters who use various
substances. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the
first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the
zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character
subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations,
and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much
about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made
in 2000.
Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers,
Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling
fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for
symbolically 'pairing' characters in his novels, which has been a
recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina
Twain in
Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in
The
Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in
Night Train).
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), about a young woman
coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it was the
first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative
voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions
of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his
contemporary
Craig Raine's 'Martian'
school of poetry.
Later career
Amis's best-known novels, and the ones most respected by critics,
are
Money,
London Fields,
Time's Arrow, and
The Information.
Money (1984, subtitled
A Suicide Note) is a
first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be
film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century." "[A]
satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed," the novel relates a
series of black comedic episodes as Self flies back and forth
across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of
personal and professional success.
Time included the novel in its list of the 100
best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005.On November 11, 2009,
The Guardian reported that the BBC has adapted
Money for television as part of their early 2010 schedule
for BBC 2. Early word on the casting includes
Nick Frost to play John Self, and will also
feature
Vincent Kartheiser, who
plays Pete Campbell in
Mad Men,
Little Dorrit's
Emma Pierson and
Jerry
Hall, who will be playing Selina Street. The adaptation is to
be a "two part drama" and is written by Tom Butterworth and Chris
Hurford.
London Fields (1989), Amis's longest work, describes the
encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a
climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian
names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the
lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a
femme fatale who is determined to be murdered;
and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor
foal' who is destined to come between the other two. The book was
reportedly omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in its year of
publication, 1989, because of panel members protesting against its
alleged misogyny.
Time's Arrow (1991), the autobiography of a doctor who
helped torture
Jews during
the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize, drew notice both for its
unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel,
down to the dialogue initially being spoken backwards — as well as
for its topic.
The size
of the advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and obtained by Amis
for The Information (1995) attracted what Amis described
as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from
writers and critics after he left his agent of many years, the late
Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard
-educated
Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. Kavanagh was married to
Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had been friends
for many years, but the incident caused a rift that, according to
Amis in his autobiography
Experience (2000), had (at the
time of writing), not yet healed.
Night Train (1997) is a
short novel in the stylised form of a US police procedural,
narrated by the female, but mannish, Detective Mike Hoolihan, who
has been called upon to investigate the suicide of her boss's
daughter. Amis's American vernacular in the narrative was
criticised by, among others,
John
Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably
in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor
Saul Bellow.
The memoir
Experience is
largely about his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis,
though he also writes of being reunited with long-lost daughter,
Delilah Seale, the product of an affair in the 1970s, whom he did
not see until she was 19, and the story of how one of his cousins,
Lucy Partington, became a victim of
Fred West when she was 21. The book was
awarded the
James Tait
Black Memorial Prize for biography.
In 2002, Amis published
Koba the Dread, a book about the
crimes of Stalinism. The book provoked a literary controversy for
its approach to the material, and for its attack on his longtime
friend
Christopher Hitchens,
who rebuked his charges in a stinging review in
The
Atlantic. Asked recently if they were still friends, Amis
responded "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of
views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that
goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been
perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."
In 2003,
Yellow Dog,
Amis's first novel in six years, was denounced by
Tibor Fischer, whose comments were widely
reported in the media: "
Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not
very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look
bad. I was reading my copy on
the Tube and
I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder . . . It's like
your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground,
masturbating". Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with
some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most
considered the book to be a great disappointment. Amis was
unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling
Yellow
Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the
novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult
literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how
thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making
writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and
that's what I go to literature for."
Yellow Dog
"controversially made the 23-book longlist for the 2003 Booker
Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the
award.
In September 2006, Amis published
House of Meetings, a
short novel about two half-brothers who loved the same woman and
who were incarcerated together in a Soviet
gulag. According to a piece in the Independent
newspaper, "It was originally to have been collected alongside two
short stories - one, a disturbing account of the life of a
body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined
final moments of Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 11 September
attacks - but late in the process, Amis decided to jettison both
from the book." In the same 2006 interview, Amis revealed that he
had "recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (the title was
based on one of Donald Rumsfeld's characteristically strangulated
linguistic formulations) in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde
of compulsive rapists on a town called Greeley, Colorado" and
instead continued to work on a follow up full novel that he had
started working on in 2003:
"The novel I'm working on is blindingly
autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant
Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn
child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this
novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The
child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more
convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child."
In 2010, after a protracted writing and editing process, Amis will
publish his long awaited new long novel
The Pregnant Widow
which marks the beginning of a new four-book deal. Originally set
for release in 2008, the novel's publication was pushed back to
2009 and then 2010 as further editing and alterations were being
made expanding the novel to some 320 pages. The pre-release
statement from publishers Johnathan Cape made available on Amazon
concerning the content of the novel states:
"The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the
sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every
Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War.
But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In
the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the
contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than
trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the
departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant
widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other,
much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will
pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet
revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete. Even
today, in 2009, the pregnancy is still in its second trimester.
Martin Amis, in "The Pregnant Widow", takes as his control
experiment a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where
half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The
result is a tragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of Money with
the historical sense of "Time's Arrow" and "House of
Meetings"."
There has been a great deal of interest in the novel among the
literati, partially due to its lengthy period of composition (six
years-from 2004 until May of 2009-including a break in which
House of Meetings was written); and partially due to some
of its reported content regarding semi-autobiographical revelations
about Amis's past girlfriends, affairs and his father. As early as
2007, there was speculation that the novel could well earn Amis the
Booker Prize title that he had come close to winning in 1991 and
2003 for
Time's Arrow and
Yellow Dog,
respectively. However, the novel was unpublished at the time of the
judges drawing up the long list and the novel missed the deadline
for consideration for the 2009 Booker.
The first public reading of the then just completed version of
The Pregnant Widow
occurred on May 11, 2009 at the Norwich Playhouse as part of the
Norwich and Norfolk festival.. Amis was in conversation with the
Observer’s Robert McCrum, a long time friend of
Amis.
At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the
Norwich Writers' Centre by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return
to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing
the mirror as an aging man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in
1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal
relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees
it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write
the novel autobiographically, (something that has been interesting
the press recently), but then concluded that real life was too
different from fiction, and difficult to drum into novel shape, so
he had to rethink the form.". Additionally, Amis "seemed quite
happy reading the opening pages in the novel’s first public
outing."
Further details concerning the novel's plot were revealed by
The Timeson May 10, 2009, its reporter Maurice Chittenden
writing that at the event "Amis said the book was originally meant
to be based much more closely on his own life. However, he had
introduced more fictional passages after realising the format was
not working." and that he "[had] been working on the partly
autobiographical
The Pregnant Widow for more than five
years."
Chittenden writes that Amis said at the event regarding the length
of the novel's protratced writing and creative gestation:
"In 2003 I tried for a couple of years [to make the
novel more autobiographical]. I flailed about and it all felt
awful. Bits were autobiographical but I had to completely rethink
it. It was an uncontrollably long and pointless novel of 200,000
words. But the summer in Italy, I drew that out.”
In an August 1, 2009 interview with
The Afterworld, Amis
clarified the nature of some of the content of
The Pregnant
Widow and revealed that he is currently "writing two novels at
the same time":
I started a novel [but] then I’m going to write a
novella before I get on to it. But I was in big trouble a few years
ago, with a huge, dead novel. And it took me a long time, and a lot
of grief, to realize -- I thought I was clutching at straws - it
turned out it was actually two novels, and they couldn’t go
together. So I wrote The Pregnant Widow, [that’s] one half of it,
and the other half I started, and it will be very autobiographical,
the next one.
On October 27, 2009,
The Daily Telegraph reported that
during a recent appearance by Amis the at Hay Festival in London,
that Amis had discussed his fascination with the glamour model
turned celebrity author Katie Price (formerly known as Jordan).
Amis went on to reveal that he "has honoured [Price] with a
character bearing some of her traits" in his forthcoming new
novella provisionally titled
State of England (also the
title of a 1986 short story by Amis). Amis said that her character
was named 'Threnody', and stated catagorically that Threnody "isn't
based on" Jordan" but readers should "bear in mind" the model when
they read the book. Furthermore, Amis said of Price: "She has no
waist, no arse ... an interesting face ... but all we are really
worshipping is two bags of silicone." but admitted to having read
both volumes of her autobiography.
Whether this new novella will definitely see the light of day after
the publication of
The Pregnant Widow and whether it will
concern either the much touted Islamic themes or autobiographical
elements that have been speculated upon as being features of his
future fiction is unknown.
Amis' remarks concerning Price and the rise of the "celebrity
author" provoked wide discussion and much fierce debate with the
press and literary circles, with
Guardian BookBlog writer
Jean Hannah Edelstein accusing Amis of misogyny and implying that
it showed insecurity on his part. David Lister in
The
Independent thought that Amis was "refreshingly unafraid to
challenge prevailing orthodoxies" but though he had also been "a
real fool". "In turning his critique of celebrity publishing into a
personal attack on a woman's physical attributes in language that
would have seemed chauvinist 40 years ago, let alone now, he has
shown his true colours, won Jordan sympathy and lost the argument
on celebrity novels." Lister wrote. These are accusations which
have been levelled at Amis before, most notably in 1989 when
London Fields was rumoured to have been excluded from the
Booker Prize longlist for similar reasons after protests by judges
Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil and exlusions from the shortlist for
the Whitbread Prize the same year. Outspoken
Independent
Editor-At-Large Janet Street Porter also attacked Amis' remarks,
"The truth is, he doesn't sell as many books as he used
to...Whether Amis can cope with it or not, Katie Price sells
millions of books to people who would not normally buy books.".
Street Porter went on to add that Price's novels were "pure
escapism" (asking "...what's wrong with that?") and that in being
"reduced to slagging off a woman who will never have read one of
his own books, or even have heard of him, in order to drum up
interest and grab a few headlines for his next opus", Amis was
"signing up to the very culture he's said to despise." Porter
signed off her piece saying that Amis shouldn't be "...such a rude
snob."
Amis was defended by fellow novelist Tony Parsons. Writing in
The Mirror, Parsons opined that "...it is wrong to suggest
that Amis is just jealous of Jordan’s sales figures. I think the
real problem is the sheer excitement that Katie/Jordan generates
among her readers. She encourages people to pour into bookshops in
a way that the likes of Martin and I can only dream about." Despite
the critical acclaim of literary fiction and high profile awards
such as the Booker Prize, Parsons said that ultimately "Jordan,
those two bestselling bags of silicone, has done more to promote
reading in this country than anyone apart from the great JK
Rowling,".
Amis revealed a few more details about Threnody and his views on
Jordan in an interview with Will Gore for the
Epsom
Guardian prior to the release of
The Pregnant Widow:
“She is a minor character,” he explains. “It is not
Jordan but a rather different type of woman who gets about as much
attention. My character is a poet, not a novelist, on the side as
well as being a glamour model.
“I think it is slightly depressing that Jordan’s autobiography is a
best seller and people queue for five hours to meet her. What does
that say about England?
“Snobbery has to start somewhere and if you can’t be snobbish about
Katie Price you are dead, you’ve gone.”
Amis has also released two collections of short stories
(
Einstein's Monsters
and
Heavy Water), four
volumes of collected journalism and criticism (
The Moronic Inferno,
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov,
The War Against
Cliché and
The Second
Plane), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade
video-game machines (
Invasion of the Space
Invaders). He also regularly appeared on television and
radio discussion and debate programmes, and contributes book
reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca
released her debut novel
Attachment in 2009 and two of
Amis' children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also
been published in their own right in
Standpoint magazine and
The Guardian,
respectively.
Current life
Amis
returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay
for two and
a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young
daughters. Amis became a grandfather in 2008 when his
daughter Delilah gave birth to a son.
He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my
absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was
in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a
distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reports
that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised
hostility towards Israel and the United States.
Political opinions
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of
nuclear proliferation. His collection
of five stories on this theme,
Einstein's Monsters, began with a
long essay entitled 'Thinkability' in which he set out his views on
the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps
because they can end all thought."
He wrote in "Nuclear City" in
Esquire of 1987 (re-published in
Visiting Mrs Nabokov)
that: "when nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop
buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly
an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of
imagined supercatastrophe."
Amis expressed his opinions on terrorism in an extended essay
published in
The Observer on
the eve of the fifth anniversary of
9/11 in which he criticized the
economic development of all Arab countries because their "aggregate
GDP... was less than the GDP of Spain", and they "lag[ged] behind
the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and
manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy,
life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual
vitality."
The Catholic-Marxist critic
Terry
Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology,
singled out and attacked Amis for a particular quote (which
Eagleton mistakenly attributed to one of Amis' essays), taken the
day after the
2006
transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, in an informal
interview in
The Times Magazine. Amis was quoted as
saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this?
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim
community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’
What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation –
further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching
people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan…
Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they
start getting tough with their children...It’s a huge dereliction
on their part". Eagleton wrote that this view is "[n]ot the
ramblings of a British National Party thug, [...] but the
reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English
metropolitan literary world".
In a later piece, Eagleton added: "But there is something rather
stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his
political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries
has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for
illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on
the sticky end of the same treatment."
Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam
and radical Islamism, stating that:
A prominent British Muslim,
Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown wrote an op-ed piece on the subject condemning
Amis and he responded with an open letter to
The Independent which the newspaper
printed in full. In it, he stated his views had been misrepresented
by both Alibhai-Brown and Eagleton.In an article in The Guardian,
Amis subsequently wrote:
On terrorism, Martin Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on
our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order
to pursue suicide-mass murder," and added: "I will never forget the
look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip
some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression,
previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying
that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which
he now had warrant."
In
comments on the BBC in October 2006 Amis expressed his view that
North
Korea
was the most dangerous of the two remaining members
of the Axis Of Evil, but that Iran
was our
"natural enemy", suggesting that we should not feel bad about
having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War, because a
"revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more
destabilising presence."
His views on radical
Islamism earned him
the contentious sobriquet
Blitcon from the
New Statesman (his former
employer). This term, it has since been argued, was wrongly
applied.
His political opinions have been attacked in some quarters,
particularly in
The Guardian. He has, however, received
support from many other writers. In
The Spectator, Philip Hensher
noted:
In June 2008, Amis endorsed the presidential candidacy of
Barack Obama, stating that "The reason I hope
for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's
image in the world".
Current employment
In
February 2007, Martin Amis was appointed as a Professor of Creative
Writing at The Manchester Centre for New
Writing in the University of Manchester
, and started in September 2007. He runs
postgraduate seminars, and participates in four public events each
year, including a two week summer school.
Of his position, he said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but... I
would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in
such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet
and gentle with them." He predicts that the experience might
inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A
campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world
wants.". It has been revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the
university is £80,000 a year. The
Manchester Evening News broke
the story claiming that according to his contract this meant he was
paid £3000 an hour for 28 hours a year teaching. The claim was
echoed in headlines in several national papers. However like any
other member of academic staff his teaching contact hours
constitute a minority of his commitments, a point confirmed in the
original article by a reply from the University.
Martin Amis is scheduled to give a number of appearances at
Manchester University's Whitworth Hall, public discussions with
other experts on various topics during 2008-2009.
Bibliography
Novels
Collections
Non fiction
References
- Stout, Mira. "Martin Amis: Down London's mean streets",
The New York Times, 4 February 1990.
- "Martin Amis", The Guardian,
undated.
- Eagleton, Ideology, (London 2007).
- Sarah Sands: "My life with the unfaithful old devil Kingsley
Amis", in Daily Mail, 6 October 2006 (retrieved
2008-05-18); Eric Jacobs: "From angry young man to old devil", Obituary
of Sir Kingsley Amis in The Guardian, 23 October 1995 (retrieved
2008-05-18).
- Leader, Zachary (2006). The Life of Kingsley Amis.
Cape, p. 614.
- "Martin Amis", British Council: Contemporary
Writers, accessed 24 January 2009
-
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/11/nick-frost-bbc2-martin-amis-money
-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/11/nick-frost-bbc2-martin-amis-money
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/11/nick-frost-bbc2-martin-amis-money
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/11/nick-frost-bbc2-martin-amis-money
- Amis, Martin, Experience (2000), pp. 247-249
- "Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions",
"The
Independent", 15 January 2007.
- "Amis needs a drink", The Times, 13 September 2003.
-
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-6732841-booker-snubs-amis-again.do
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/martin-amis-30-things-ive-learned-about-terror-418950.html
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/martin-amis-30-things-ive-learned-about-terror-418950.html
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http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/2009/05/martinamisthereturnofthemaster/
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/martin-amis-30-things-ive-learned-about-terror-418950.html
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pregnant-Widow-Martin-Amis/dp/0224076124
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http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/2009/05/martin-amis-treats-norwich-to-first-reading-of-the-pregnant-widow/
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http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/2009/05/martin-amis-treats-norwich-to-first-reading-of-the-pregnant-widow/
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http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/2009/05/martin-amis-treats-norwich-to-first-reading-of-the-pregnant-widow/
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http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/2009/05/martin-amis-treats-norwich-to-first-reading-of-the-pregnant-widow/
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http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6256982.ece
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http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6256982.ece
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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/afterword/archive/2009/08/01/q-amp-a-with-martin-amis-quot-there-s-only-one-way-of-judging-quality-and-that-s-time-quot.aspx
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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/afterword/archive/2009/08/01/q-amp-a-with-martin-amis-quot-there-s-only-one-way-of-judging-quality-and-that-s-time-quot.aspx
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6447521/Jordan-is-just-two-bags-of-silicone-says-Martin-Amis.html
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6447521/Jordan-is-just-two-bags-of-silicone-says-Martin-Amis.html
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6447521/Jordan-is-just-two-bags-of-silicone-says-Martin-Amis.html
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6447521/Jordan-is-just-two-bags-of-silicone-says-Martin-Amis.html
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6447521/Jordan-is-just-two-bags-of-silicone-says-Martin-Amis.html
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6447521/Jordan-is-just-two-bags-of-silicone-says-Martin-Amis.html
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/oct/28/martin-amis-katie-price-women
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/david-lister/david-lister-you-need-a-phd-for-a-night-at-the-opera-1812304.html
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/david-lister/david-lister-you-need-a-phd-for-a-night-at-the-opera-1812304.html
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/david-lister/david-lister-you-need-a-phd-for-a-night-at-the-opera-1812304.html
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http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aW1e-Ep7C1IC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=London+Fields+Booker+Prize&source=bl&ots=wh6JgEKhfT&sig=Sb0yewYkD7IYDo2Ci_fq_9k2rtM&hl=en&ei=Xl_oSpWNK9TD-Qb5oI2JBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CA8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=London%20Fields%20Booker%20Prize&f=false
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/janet-street-porter/editoratlarge-face-it-martin-ndash-katie-sells-books-and-you-dont-1812777.html
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/janet-street-porter/editoratlarge-face-it-martin-ndash-katie-sells-books-and-you-dont-1812777.html
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/janet-street-porter/editoratlarge-face-it-martin-ndash-katie-sells-books-and-you-dont-1812777.html
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/janet-street-porter/editoratlarge-face-it-martin-ndash-katie-sells-books-and-you-dont-1812777.html
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/janet-street-porter/editoratlarge-face-it-martin-ndash-katie-sells-books-and-you-dont-1812777.html
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http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/parsons/2009/10/30/katie-price-why-it-is-right-that-we-worship-two-bags-of-silicone-115875-21785738/
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http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/parsons/2009/10/30/katie-price-why-it-is-right-that-we-worship-two-bags-of-silicone-115875-21785738/
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http://www.epsomguardian.co.uk/leisure/4730776.Martin_Amis_at_Book_Now_Festival/
- http://www.martinamisweb.com/days.shtml
- Amis, Martin. "The Age of Horrorism", The Observer,
23 February 2007.
- Martin Amis interviewed by Ginny Dougary,
originally published in The Times Magazine, 9 September
2006
- Eagleton, Rebuking obnoxious views is not just a
personality kink, The Guardian, Wednesday 10 October
2007
- [1] Martin Amis on Barack Obama
- Yakub Qureshi, £3,000 an hour for Amis, Manchester Evening
News, 25/1/2008; Amis the £3k an hour professor,
Guardian, 26/01/2008.
- Yakub Qureshi, op. cit., Manchester Evening News,
25/1/2008.
External links
Comprehensive information and hubs
Sample works and articles by Amis
- Authors in the front line: Martin Amis, The
Sunday Times Magazine, 6 February 2005 – On the streets of
Colombia, young boys cripple or murder each other just for showing
disrespect or for winning at a game of cards. Is the taste for
violence opening up a wound that can never heal? Report: Martin
Amis – In The Sunday Times Magazine's continuing series of
articles, renowned writers bring a fresh perspective to the world's
trouble spots. The international medical-aid organisation MSF has helped our correspondents reach some of these
inhospitable areas.
- CareerMove - A complete short story by
Amis.
- The Unknown Known - A satire on fundamentalism
in this extract from an unpublished manuscript by Amis
Interviews
Reviews
Note: for reviews of individual works, please see its
article.
Amis and "Islamism"
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