Martin Amis's short stories make his novels look prim. They are also more frankly satirical. Whole words are created - or inverted. In "Straight Fiction", everyone is gay (apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community); in "Career Moves", screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in "The Janitor on Mars", a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. Largely absent in the novels, the middle classes get a showing in "Let Me Count the Times", where a man has had a mad affair with himself. "Heavy Water", portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, "State of England" its weird resuscitation. And in "The Coincidence of the Arts" an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler. The earliest story, "Denton's Death", was first published in 1975, but the bulk of the collection can be firmly labelled 'most recent work'.
作者簡介
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories and five collections of non-fiction. His memoir, Experience, was published by Vintage in 2001.
