Author:Martin Amis
In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janitor of Mars', a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. In 'Let Me Count the Times' a man has a mad affair with himself. 'Heavy Water', portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, and 'State of England' its weird resuscitation. And in 'The Coincidence of the Arts' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler.
Brilliant - a remarkable feat of rhetorical beauty and overwhelming truth... A terrific collection - brilliantly varied, constantly surprising chips of a superb imagination
—— Mail on SundayAmis is immaculate as a comic stylist - irresistible
—— Daily TelegraphThis volume is essential reading for anyone remotely interested in where we are and how we got here
—— Sunday TimesComic inversions, fantastical celebrations and ripe satire - of popular culture, personal relationships, even the space-time continuum - all jostle in these pages... Simply ace
—— EsquireAmis applies his comic timing, his perfect pitch and his curatorial eye to some of the burning issues of our time
—— New York Times Book ReviewAlice Munro! Now that's writing
—— Margaret AtwoodThat Munro is a great writer of short stories should go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive
—— Sunday TimesThis superb collection...confirms Munro's place as the laureate of thwarted passion - and quite possibly the greatest short-story writer at work today
—— Daily Telegraph