Heavy Water And Other Stories

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His eyes were a scurvy yellow, his saliva a loud crimson, venomous and also acidic, capable of dissolving human bones. Despite the praise for House of Meetings, once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes.

Stalinism is the subject of the nonfiction Koba the Dread (2002) and the novel House of Meetings (2006). As the New York Times puts it, its “rollicking, repulsive picture of London and New York in the late 20th century, awash in cash, corruption, pornography, junk food, junk art, self-promotion and wretched excess of every imaginable variety” was borne forth on a devastatingly effective overflow of virtuosic sentences.The novel found other defenders too, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's mentor and friend Saul Bellow. Two early stories from the 70's ( Denton's Death and the updated title story) baffled us completely. He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). According to a piece in The Independent, the novel "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. Notable for its backwards narrative, including dialogue in reverse, the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor.

In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Amis said that United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union was a "self-inflicted wound" that had left him "depressed". Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions" Archived 4 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine, The Independent, 15 January 2007. In 2015, Amis criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for The Sunday Times, describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated". Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his blunt common sense, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read informed, elegant, surprising and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with.Later novels included The Pregnant Widow (2010), Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012), The Zone of Interest (2014), and Inside Story (2020). His works—including the novels Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow (1991), and Night Train (1998)—feature inventive wordplay and often scabrous humour as they satirize the horrors of modern life.