Heavy Water And Other Stories

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Summary

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.

Reviews

Brilliant - a remarkable feat of rhetorical beauty and overwhelming truth... A terrific collection - brilliantly varied, constantly surprising chips of a superb imagination
Mail on Sunday

About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

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