Heavy Water - and Other Stories

Zusatztext "Amis applies his comic timing! his perfect pitch and his curatorial eye to some of the burning issues of our time." -- The New York Times Book Review "Martin Amis is a force unto himself. . . . There is! quite simply! no one else like him." -- The Washington Post Informationen zum Autor MARTIN AMIS is the author of 15 novels—among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train —along with the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story , two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He died in 2023. Klappentext "Martin Amis is a stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight." --The Wall Street Journal In this wickedly delightful collection of stories, Martin Amis once again demonstrates why he is a modern master of the form. In "Career Move," screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In "Straight Fiction," the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire--the opposite sex. And in "State of England," Mal, a former "minder to the superstars," discovers how to live in a country where "class and race and gender were supposedly gone." In Heavy Water and Other Stories, Amis astonishes us with the vast range of his talent, establishing that he is one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation.From "Career Move" When alistair finished his new screenplay, Offensive from Quasar 13, he submitted it to the LM, and waited. Over the past year, he had had more than a dozen screenplays rejected by the Little Magazine. On the other hand, his most recent submission, a batch of five, had been returned not with the standard rejection slip but with a handwritten note from the screenplay editor, Hugh Sixsmith. The note said: I was really rather taken with two or three of these, and seriously tempted by Hotwire, which I thought close to being fully achieved. Do please go on sending me your stuff. Hugh Sixsmith was himself a screenplay writer of considerable, though uncertain, reputation. His note of encouragement was encouraging. It made Alistair brave. Boldly he prepared Offensive from Quasar 13 for submission. He justified the pages of the typescript with fondly lingering fingertips. Alistair did not address the envelope to the Screenplay Editor. No. He addressed it to Mr. Hugh Sixsmith. Nor, for once, did he enclose his curriculum vitae, which he now contemplated with some discomfort. It told, in a pitiless staccato, of the screenplays he had published in various laptop broadsheets and comically obscure pamphlets; it even told of screenplays published in his university magazine. The truly disgraceful bit came at the end, where it said "Rights Offered: First British Serial only. " Alistair spent a long time on the covering note to Sixsmith--almost as long as he had spent on Offensive from Quasar 13. The note got shorter and shorter the more he worked on it. At last he was satisfied. There in the dawn he grasped the envelope and ran his tongue across its darkly luminous cuff. That Friday, on his way to work, and suddenly feeling completely hopeless, Alistair surrendered his parcel to the sub post office in Calchalk Street, off the Euston Road. Deliberately--very deliberately--he had enclosed no stamped, addressed envelope. The accompanying letter, in its entirety, read as follows: "Any use? If not--w.p.b." "W.p.b." stood, of course, for "wastepaper basket"--a receptacle that loomed forbiddingly large in the life of a practicing screenplay writer. With a hand on his brow, Alistair sidled his way out of there--past the birthday cards, the tensed pensioners, the envelopes, and the balls of string. When Luke finished the new poem--entitled, simply, "S...

Product details

• Authors: Martin Amis
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 14.03.2000
• EAN: 9780375701153
• ISBN: 978-0-375-70115-3
• No. of pages: 208
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 13 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature