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Stopping being married to someone," my father had written, 10 years earlier, "is an incredibly violent thing to happen to you, not easy to take in completely, ever." He knew I was now absorbing the truth and the force of this. And he knew also that the process could not be softened or hastened. All you could do was survive it. That surviving was a possibility he showed me, by example. But he did more. He roused himself and did more. "Talk as much as you want about it or as little as you want." These words sounded like civilisation to me, in my barbarous state, so dishevelled in body and mind. In January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year. [104] Of his time teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester, Amis was quoted as saying, "teaching creative writing at Manchester has been a joy" and that he had "become very fond of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire". [105] He added that he "loved doing all the reading and the talking; and I very much took to the Mancunians. They are a witty and tolerant contingent". [105] Amis was succeeded in this position by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín in September 2011. [105] As a youth, Amis, the son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, thrived literarily on a permissive home atmosphere and a “passionate street life.” He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1971 with first-class honours in English and worked for several years as an editor on such publications as the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman. A lifelong smoker, Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his house in the US state of Florida in May 2023. [6] The New York Times wrote after his death: "To come of reading age in the last three decades of the 20th century – from the oil embargo through the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the way to 9/11 – was to live, it now seems clear, in the Amis Era." [7] Early life [ edit ]

The Rachel Papers won a Somerset Maugham award. And the model for the “Rachel” fictionalised in his debut – his first love – introduced him to the Jewish themes that would draw him with increasing force. For a while, though, his fiction declined to grow up. Dead Babies (1975) performs stylistic somersaults around a country-house parody, although the warring foster-brothers of Success (1978) inaugurate the trademark Amis play of pairs. His UK editor, Michal Shavit, said: “It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis in it. He was the king – a stylist extraordinaire, super cool, a brilliantly witty, erudite and fearless writer, and a truly wonderful man. The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his female characters. "It was an incredible row", Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told The Independent. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there were only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, 'It's two against three, Martin's on the list'." [48]At certain times, for certain periods, David was able to persuade himself that Lucy was still alive - alive, but elsewhere. Naturally all the Partingtons attempted something of the kind. My mother, too, attempted it. I attempted it. Lucy was serious, resolute, artistic, musical and religious. Even when we were children, the message I always took away from Lucy was that she wasn't going to be deflected, she wasn't going to be deterred.

The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times. 5 January 2008. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 26 September 2020. Sharp, Rob (12 February 2011). "Amis: I'd write for children only if I'd had a brain injury". The Independent . Retrieved 25 May 2023. I met Martin Amis briefly a handful of times, at book signings and literary festivals. He was, on each occasion, kind but guarded. He once wrote, not unaffectionately, about the “wild-eyed sleazebags” who tended to turn up in his signing queues. I probably made a better impression than that, whenever I approached him – at least I hope I did. But it took me a long time to work out why he might have found it prudent to stay aloof. He had put so much of himself in his books; and in doing so proffered the sort of intimacy that leaves you vulnerable, even to the attentions of the well-meaning. Much modern prose,” Amis told the Paris Review in 1998, “is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, et cetera […] Once, I called it ‘vow-of-poverty prose.’ No, give me the king in his countinghouse.” Amis might also have complained that much modern prose is void of humour. But his wasn’t. The extended joke was his characteristic prose move. This might be why prize juries and middlebrow critics failed to take him seriously. (If you want to be taken seriously, be serious all the time.) “My teeth made headlines”: that’s from Experience. A throwaway gag. But Amis paid that kind of close attention to every sentence he ever published. What I liked about it is while it was brilliantly written and extremely funny, it also had a great deal of compassion.

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A) balanced, haunting work of memory and memorial, a surprisingly gentle meditation on fathers and sons, mortality, the loss of innocence, divorce, friendship, love -- what Amis calls "the main events," those "ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters" that shape you and define you and remain forever in your blood and being." - Andrew Roe, Salon And when the man is a novelist -- why he's hardly to be trusted more than any of the members of the Fourth Estate Amis inveighs against. Martin Amis as a child, centre, with his family: from left, his brother, Philip, mother, Hilly, sister, Sally, and father, Kingsley. Photograph: Daily Mail/Rex Features Mambrol, Nasrullah (24 June 2020). "Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's Stories". Literary Theory and Criticism . Retrieved 23 May 2023. In part that is because there is so much else about which Martin says so little -- including the other women in his life, as well as his books (one hardly senses book-writing is his main occupation).

She came to see me when she was at Exeter, just before the last year, and I said to her, 'Now that you are grown-up, what are you going to do?' and she said, 'I don't mind what I do, as long as I do it absolutely to the hilt.' And then I said, 'Yes, that's fine, but where are you going?' and she thought awfully hard, then she said, 'Towards the light... Towards the light.'" Martin Amis with his great friend Christopher Hitchens, the journalist and essayist. Photograph: Alamy Kingsley's arrangement with Eric Jacob's is never adequately explained, and neither are many of the details of the controversy. Also around this time, Amis lost an old friend (Julian Barnes), an old agent (Pat Kavanagh), separated from his wife and two children, became horribly famous for his teeth (not, of course, the extraction of a few molars, but the reconstruction of his entire jaw), and lost his father, who died in November, 1995. He also learned that he was the father of a 17-year-old daughter, Delilah Seale, whom he had never met. Amis did not really collapse so much as die into middle age. Innocence had been vandalised. His tears, as the Psalmist has it, had become his meat, day and night. We are devastated at the death of our author and friend, Martin Amis: novelist, essayist, memoirist, critic, stylist supreme,” it said.Ian Hamilton, in the Sunday Telegraph, contrasted the pained, middle-aged Amis with the confident youth who had enjoyed instant literary success in the 1970s. "There is a lot of remorse and recantation in this book," wrote Hamilton, "a book, the author says, of sunderings and breakages, of heart-rending losses and dizzying new gains and a perhaps too-urgent need to exhibit some transfiguration of the self." And I told him about my recent visit to Cape Cod to see my children, and their mother - to whom I had become a stranger, from whom I was estranged. The boys sensed that there was a possibility of reconciliation. On the first morning, Jacob pushed my coffee cup an inch nearer my right hand and said, "Enjoying your stay so far?"...

Stolarek, Joanna (2009). "Martin Amis's Night Train: a Pastiche of the Classical Detective Story or Hard-Boiling Metaphysics?". Anglica Debating Literature and Culture. 17: 139–151. Night Train does not conform to the standards of the crime novel due to the absence of crime and a genuine culprit. Martin Amis, (born August 25, 1949, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died May 19, 2023, Lake Worth, Florida, U.S.), English satirist known for his virtuoso storytelling technique and his dark views of contemporary English society. For 40 years Martin Amis bestrode the world of UK publishing: first by defining what it meant to be a literary wunderkind by releasing his first novel at just 24; influencing a generation of prose stylists; and often summing up entire eras with his books, perhaps most notably with his classic novel, Money.

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London Fields (1989), Amis's longest and "most London" novel, [46] describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, "the fool, the foil, the poor foal" who is destined to come between the other two. [47] The brief mention of the peculiar living arrangement of the last years (Kingsley's ex-wife (Martin's mum) and her husband moved in with him) typifies Martin's approach to many of the "controversial" pieces in the book: readers of newspaper-articles on this book learn more about the arrangement than they do in the book itself.