ACTUELLEMENT ÉPUISÉ

Heavy Water And Other Stories by Martin Amis (Hardcover, 1998)

Martin Amis's short stories make his novels look prim. They are also more frankly satirical. Whole world's are created - or invented. 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 had a mad affair with himself. 'Heavy Water' portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture; 'State of England' portrays 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'.

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