Martin Amis
| Martin Amis | |
|---|---|
| Martin Louis Amis | |
| Birthday | |
| Birthplace | Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | MA (Oxon) |
Amis, Martin
(ā`mĭs), 1949–, English novelist; son of Kingsley AmisAmis, Sir Kingsley, 1922–95, English novelist. He attended St. John's College, Oxford (B.A., 1949) and for some 20 years taught at Oxford, Swansea, and Cambridge and in the United States before he could afford to become a full-time writer.
..... Click the link for more information. . The younger Amis, who turned from literary journalism to fiction, invites comparison with his father through his choice of career and style. Often writing satire so bitterly sardonic it goes far beyond his father's caustic comedy, he has exposed the darker aspects of contemporary English society in his novels. Among them are The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1975), Money (1984), London Fields (1990), The Information (1995), Yellow Dog (2003), The Pregnant Widow (2010), and Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012). His short-story collections include Heavy Water and Other Stories (1999). Among his nonfiction works are the short pieces, mainly literary essays in The War against Cliché (2001) and The Rub of Time (2017). In his literary criticism, Amis tends to favor style over matter; his particular stylistic heroes are Vladamir NabokovNabokov, Vladimir
, 1899–1977, Russian-American author, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. He emigrated to England after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and graduated from Cambridge in 1922. He moved to the United States in 1940.
..... Click the link for more information. and Saul BellowBellow, Saul,
1915–2005, American novelist, b. Lachine, Que., as Solomon Bellow, grad. Northwestern Univ., 1937. Born of Russian-Jewish parents, he grew up in the slums of Montreal and Chicago, and lived mostly in Chicago with periods spent in New York and other cities;
..... Click the link for more information. . His Koba the Dread (2002) is an examination of Stalinism's horrors and the attitudes of Western intellectuals toward the Soviet regime. The novel House of Meetings (2006) treats similar themes—the GulagGulag,
system of forced-labor prison camps in the USSR, from the Russian acronym [GULag] for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a department of the Soviet secret police (originally the Cheka; subsequently the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and finally the KGB).
..... Click the link for more information. and Stalinist atrocities. He explores the Holocaust in his novels Time's Arrow (1991), the story of a Nazi concentration camp doctor told in reverse chronological order, and The Zone of Interest (2014), which treats intimacy, the banality of evil, and the horrors of the Nazi genocide. The essays and stories in The Second Plane September 11 (2008) are collectively a polemic that condemns Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist terrorism.
Bibliography
See his memoir Experience (2000); biography by R. Bradford (2012); studies by J. Diedrick (1995, repr. 2004), J. A. Dern (2000), G. Keulks (2003 and, ed., 2006).