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Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590176898 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children”), and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.
Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590176898 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children”), and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.
Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590175921 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Booker Prize Winner A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post). Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590176170 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick) In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590176901 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonard Bernstein, is a pillar of the establishment whohas fallen hard for protest, bellbottoms, and the electric guitar. And since vain Sir Vandervane is a great success, he is also free to pursue his greatest failing: a taste for younger and younger women. Highborn hippie Sylvia (not, in fact, twenty) is his latest infatuation and a threat to his whole family, from his drama-queen wife, Kitty, to Penny, his long-suffering daughter. All this is recounted by Douglas Yandell, a music critic with his own love problems, who finds that he too has a part in this story of botched artistry, bumbling celebrity, and scheming family, in a time that for all its high-minded talk is as low and dishonest as any other.
Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590176162 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous and “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author (The New York Times) Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral. Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death. The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.
Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590177983 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Take a Girl Like You may well be Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious reckoning with the serious subject at the heart of his work: the sheer squalor—emotional, material, sexual, you name it—of modern life. It also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis’s rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a girl from the (English) north country come south to teach school in a small smug town where she hopes to find love and fortune. Jenny is a beauty and men and women are crazy about her, most of all handsome Patrick Standish, who Jenny also likes. But Jenny and Patrick live in a world where it’s becoming ridiculously difficult—disastrously difficult—to sort out the claims of sex and the claims of love.
Author: Kingsley Amis Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141961791 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 169
Book Description
At Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage in the English countryside, five elderly people live together in rancorous disharmony. Adela Bastable bosses the house, as her brother Bernard passes his days thinking up malicious schemes against the baby-talking Marigold and secret drinker Shorty, while kindly George lies bedridden upstairs. The mismatched quintet keep their spirits alive by bickering and waiting for grandchildren to visit at Christmas. But the festive season does not herald goodwill to all at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage. Disaster and chaos, it seems, are just around the corner ... Told with Amis's piercing wit and humanity, Ending Up (1974) is a wickedly funny black comedy of the indignities of old age. With a new introduction by Helen Dunmore.
Author: Justin Webb Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1476730202 Category : Humor Languages : en Pages : 131
Book Description
An editor at BBC-TV takes a witty and honest look at the “special” relationship between the US and the UK. IMAGINE INVITING A BRIT TO A BARBECUE - THAT’S THIS BOOK. Justin Webb was the BBC’s man in America. He covered politics and interviewed presidents, but more importantly he reported, as Alistair Cooke once did, on the rich tapestry of American life. This is his toast to a country he called home for the best part of a decade. Webb’s America is a place of possibility and promise. He is scornful of those who think the nation is in decline, and posits an exciting new diplomatic era in which America diversifies its international relationships. Cheers, America will make you smile. Its wry and heartfelt observations provide a redeeming vision of our country at a time when it is redefining its identity.
Author: Zadie Smith Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101218118 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth "In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
Author: Nigel Marsh Publisher: Hachette UK ISBN: 1405513756 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Approaching forty, Nigel Marsh's life seems almost perfect: he has moved with his family from the UK to Sydney and runs the Australian office of a leading advertising agency. However, he is also stressed, overweight and struggling to balance a career, a marriage and the demands of four small children. But everything changes when he loses his job. After the initial shock of redundancy, Marsh decides to embrace life outside the office and reconnect with his family. FAT, FORTY AND FIRED is the hilarious, insightful and deeply moving account of his 'gap year' at home, as he rediscovers fatherhood, loses twenty kilograms, kicks his drinking habit, trains for an ocean swim race and generally gets his house in order. FAT, FORTY AND FIRED is a story for anyone who has dreamed about leaving the rat race behind and living a more meaningful life.
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Kingsley Amis
Author: Justin Webb
Author: Zadie Smith
Author: Nigel Marsh