About this item
An autobiographical novel thats a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die - from "the Mick Jagger of literature ... Amis is the most dazzling prose stylist in post-war British fiction" (The Daily Telegraph) . . "[A] charismatic compound of fact and fiction ... Martin Amis has retained the power to surprise." - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times . This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amiss closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books, and where to lunch) , Hitch was Amiss wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps - an obsession Amis must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness. . Other figures competing as Amiss main influencers are his literary fathers - Kingsley, of course; his hero Saul Bellow; the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin - and his significant literary mothers, including Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Moving among these greats to set his own path, he winds up surveying the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of the 9/11 attacks on the twenty-first - and considers what all of this has taught him about how to live and how to be a writer. . The result is a love letter to life - and to the people in his life - that achieves a new level of confidentiality with his readers, giving us the previously unseen portrait of his extraordinary world.
About the Author
Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989) . He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog) . Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.Amis's work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
