‘Damn, that fool can write’: how Martin Amis made everyone up their game

He exploded into the tweedy world of literature, a young, pouting and outrageously brash crusader for prose. Our writer remembers her encounters with the novelist, whose smarts and chutzpah confounded his peers‘You’ll be reading me every now and then at least until about 2080, weather permitting. And when you go, maybe my afterlife, too, will come to an end, my afterlife of words.” So wrote Martin Amis in his heavily autobiographical final novel Inside Story in 2020. With a body of work spanning 50 years, he leaves 15 novels, two short-story collections, one memoir and seven book-length works of journalism and history. Did posterity matter to him? Hell, yes. “There is only one value judgment in literature: time,” he insisted.Back in 2009, I called Amis – as editors all over the world would have been calling or emailing leading writers on Saturday night – to ask if he might write a tribute to the American novelist John Updike, who had just died. Time was tight and we were aiming high, but as with every major (and not so major) event at that time, Amis was the writer everyone was after. And on Updike, the last postwar American literary giant? It had to be him. Happily, he felt a duty to contribute to what Gore Vidal called “book chat”. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2023-05-22 05:00:48 UTC ]

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Edelweiss, Edelweiss? Julie Andrews Loves Reading About 18th-Century Plant Hunters

“I’m fascinated by stories of how the various plant specimens we take for granted today were originally discovered,” says the actor, whose latest book is “Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years.” Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2019-12-05 10:00:03 UTC ]
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'Crawdads,' 'Becoming' Top Amazon 2019 Lists

Led by sales of such of powerhouse titles as Delia Owen's wildly popular novel 'Where the Crawdads Sing' on the fiction list, and Michelle Obama's memoir 'Becoming' for nonfiction, Amazon released lists of the e-tailers top selling books of 2019. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly

[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-12-05 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Mitch Albom Reads From His New Memoir Finding Chika

Storybound is a radio theater program designed for the podcast age. Hosted by Jude Brewer and with original music composed for each episode, the podcast features the voices of today’s literary icons reading their essays, poems, and fiction. In our first episode, Mitch Albom reads an excerpt from... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2019-12-03 09:47:32 UTC ]
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Lit Hub Weekly: November 25 – 27, 2019

Of Bohumil Hrabal’s six great loves, guess how many were cats? (Hint: almost all of them.) | Lit Hub Memoir The car culture that’s helping destroy the planet was by no means inevitable: on the relentless campaign to force Americans to accept the automobile. | Lit Hub History Here are the 78 best... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2019-11-30 12:30:39 UTC ]
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An American Boy and His Jamaican Nanny: A Conversation with Ross Kenneth Urken

“UNLIKE MOST JEWISH BOYS from New Jersey, I have a Jamaican accent,” writes Ross Kenneth Urken in Another Mother, his memoir in which he goes in search of both his recollections of the Jamaican nanny who raised him and all of the things he never knew about her before she died. He writes,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-11-24 20:00:33 UTC ]
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Our Bodies, Ourselves: On Saeed Jones’s “How We Fight for Our Lives”

THE QUEER COMING-OF-AGE MEMOIR is a weapon against erasure. The best of these memoirs move us by daring to be profoundly specific, providing a necessary consolation to readers who might have believed until then that they were alone in the dark. That their suffering would have no choice but to... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-11-24 13:30:59 UTC ]
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10 Books Like BECOMING By Michelle Obama

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[ Book Riot | 2019-11-20 11:36:56 UTC ]
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Elton John opens up about memoir during sold-out talk with David Walliams

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-19 16:03:01 UTC ]
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Yes He Did: Barajas Graphic Bio Reclaims Great-Granddad’s Civil Rights Legacy

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-11-19 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Carmen Maria Machado’s Memoir Is Riddled with Restless Ghosts

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[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-15 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Alan Davies to publish memoir with Little, Brown

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-15 09:50:15 UTC ]
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Michael O’Mara Books to publish Jay Jayamohan's memoir

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-15 05:03:30 UTC ]
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How an Episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Wound Up in a Memoir About Domestic Abuse

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[ Slate | 2019-11-14 23:07:23 UTC ]
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As Turkish writer Ahmet Altan is rearrested, his prison memoir is as urgent as ever

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[ The Washington Post | 2019-11-14 18:01:28 UTC ]
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Jamaica: A Small Nation With an Outsize Global Influence

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[ The New York Times | 2019-11-13 19:00:09 UTC ]
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Edward Snowden claims Chinese edition of memoir has been censored

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-13 03:25:45 UTC ]
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The Memoir of a Political Prisoner Who Never Stopped Imagining a Better World

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[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-11 12:00:01 UTC ]
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Tales of Medical Gaslighting: Chronic Pain, Sexism, and More

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[ Literrary Hub | 2019-11-08 09:47:44 UTC ]
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How a Tell-All Memoir Made It Into Print

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[ The New York Times | 2019-11-08 06:50:32 UTC ]
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This is Going to Hurt tops the year-to-date chart

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[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-08 05:28:53 UTC ]
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