Martin Amis, página 2 de 9

IONEL ASBO is going about his morning duties in a London prison when he learns that he has just won £139,999,999.50 in the National Lottery. This is not necessarily good news for his ward and nephew, who still has reason to fear his uncle's implacable vengeance. Savage, funny and mysteriously poignant, LIONEL ASBO is a modern fairytale from one of the world's great writers.

"For all its savagery...Other Peopleis a funny book... an achievement light years ahead of his earlier novels." --The Times "Powerful and electrifying...Other Peopleis a metaphysical thriller, Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho." -- J. G. Ballard "One of the most gifted novelists of his generation." --Time "Amis is a force unto himself... There is, quite simply, no one else like him." -- Jonathan Yardley,Washington Post Book World

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle. As one brother, finally, writes to the other, 'You know what happened to us? It wasn't just a compendium of very bad experiences. That was general and standard-issue. That was off the rack. What I'm referring to is the destiny that is made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there. For each of us, in different ways and settings, the worst of all possible outcomes.' A short novel of great depth and richness, House of Meetings finds Martin Amis at the height of his powers, in new and remarkably fertile fictional territory.

When ''dream husband'' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head- injury, and personality- change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti- husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system- one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the ''yellow'' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Kent Price, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen- year- old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed ''intrusion'' which rivets the world- because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of YELLOW DOG. Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a reading of the present and the very near future. If, in the twenty-first century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. YELLOW DOG is an early example of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation. But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category- error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.

Ce qui suit est une lettre pour expliquer mon suicide. Quand vous la poserez, John Self aura cessé d’exister. M. A. En ce début des années 1980, Margaret Thatcher est Premier ministre du Royaume-Uni

Voici une confession. Elle sera brève. Je ne voulais pas avoir à lui faire ça. J’aurais infiniment préféré une autre solution. Enfin, c’est comme ça. M. A. Lorsqu’elle se réveille et s’assoit, elle

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for "The Guardian" beginning, 'It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.' And he has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, "In the Place of the End" and "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta". All are collected here, together with an expanded account of his travels with Tony Blair in 2007 - to Belfast, to Washington, and to Baghdad and Basra. 'We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism,' he writes: 'the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq ...Meanwhile, September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.'

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for IThe/I IGuardian /Ibeginning, ''It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue ofLiberty: that was the defining moment.'' In the years that passed since then, he has returned to the subject again and again, in reviews (ofthe film IUnited 93/I as well as books), essays and two remarkable short stories, ''In the Palace of the End'' and ''The Last Days of Muhammad Atta''. All are collected here, together with his account of the time he spent shadowing Tony Blair for the ISunday Times/I. As Amis says in his introduction, ''If September 11 had to happen, I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime. That day and what followed from it: this is a narrative of misery and pain, and also of desperate fascination. Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits and medic''s smocks of the Islamic radical?''

Xan Meo, fils de gangster devenu acteur et romancier raffiné, se fait violemment agresser et subit une étrange métamorphose. Le roi Henry IX tente d''étouffer un double scandale : sa liaison avec une mysterieuse Chinoise, et une video scabreuse ou apparait l''heritiere du trone. Clint Smoker, journaliste a scandale, a des raisons bien personnelles d''aller en Californie interviewer une reine du porno. Et pendant ce temps, le vol 101, reserve aux fumeurs, arrivera-t-il a destination ? En entrecroisant ces histoires, Martin Amis livre une charge feroce contre une Angleterre a peine imaginaire, de Buckingham Palace au Londres de la pegre. Moraliste sans concession, satiriste impitoyable, il prouve surtout une fois de plus sa puissance visionnaire et sa capacite a reinventer la langue en offrant un feu d''artifice stylistique qui brasse tous les parlers. Et ce livre monstre, l''un de ses plus aboutis, resume notre temps comme peu d''uvres savent le faire.

Raconter la vie d'un homme à l'envers : telle est l'idée maîtresse de ce livre. Tod, le héros, n'avale pas sa soupe ; il la recrache. Toute relation sentimentale commence par une gifle, se poursuit p

"As my cab pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast right across our bows. We banked, and hit a deep welt or grapple-ridge in the road: to the sound of a rifle-shot the cab roof ducked down and smacked me on the core of my head. I really didn't need that, I tell you, with my head and face and back and heart hurting a lot all the time anyway, and still drunk and crazed and ghosted from the plane."

El ex hombre-fuerte de un circo, veterano de Varsovia en 1939, y artista de Notting Hill, encuentra su propio y personal holocausto en "Bujak y la fuerza poderosa o Los dados de Dios". Aburrimiento maximo y amor minimo son aconsejados en "La enfermedad del tiempo". Una esquizofrenica virulenta abruma al joven hijo del "padre de la era nuclear" en "Lucidez en Flama Lake". La evolucion ha tomado un camino repugnante en la kafkiana historia de amor "El cachorrito que pudo", y la historia de la tierra es discutida con franqueza por alguien que lo ha visto todo en "Los inmortales." Encuadernacion: Tapa dura con sobrecubierta.

Summer 1970 - a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends. The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasn''t bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing. THE PREGNANT WIDOW is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, brilliant, haunting and gloriously risque. It is the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year and Martin Amis at his fearless best.

Una brillante mirada de nuestra sociedad bajo la lupa periodística de Amis. ¿Qué tienen en común Graham Greene, J. G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, John Updike, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Isaac Asimov, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Larkin, los Rolling Stones, John Lenon, Roman Polanski, Karpov y Kasparov, Madonna y la señora Nabokov? Como minimo, que todos ellos han despertado el interes de Martin Amis, uno de los autores mas aplaudidos de la nueva narrativa britanica, y faceta acaso menos conocida un excelente periodista, tal como esta suculenta recopilacion de reportajes, articulos y breves ensayos permite comprobar.Martin Amis retrata a sus maestros y a sus coetaneos, juega al poquer con Al Alvarez y David Mamet, asoma la nariz en una convencion republicana en Nueva Orleans, se pasea por la Feria del Libro de Frankfurt, presencia una partida de dardos, contempla a las bañistas en topless en Cannes, asiste al rodaje de Robocop II Este libro agudo, chispeante y rebosante de inteligencia es, en definitiva, un viaje por nuestro peculiar, contradictorio y siempre sorprendente mundo de la mano de uno de los mejores escritores ingleses contemporaneos.