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  • Full bibliographic data for Lionel Asbo

    Title
    Lionel Asbo
    Subtitle
    State of England
    Authors and contributors
    By (author) Martin Amis
    Physical properties
    Format: Hardback
    Number of pages: 272
    Width: 167 mm
    Height: 241 mm
    Thickness: 26 mm
    Weight: 513 g
    Audience
    General/trade
    Language
    English
    ISBN
    ISBN 13: 9780307958082
    ISBN 10: 0307958086
    Classifications
    BISAC category code: FIC043000
    LC classification: PS
    BISAC category code: FIC019000
    Nielsen BookScan Product Class: F1.1
    BICMainSubject: FA
    BISAC category code: FIC037000
    Dewey: FIC
    Dewey: 823.914
    Publisher
    Knopf Publishing Group
    Imprint name
    Knopf Publishing Group
    Publication date
    21 August 2012
    Publication City/Country
    US
    Main description
    An exuberant, acidic satire of modern society and celebrity culture--by a renowned author at the height of his powers. Young Desmond Pepperdine desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love. Unfortunately for him, he's the ward of his uncle, Lionel Asbo (self-named after England's infamous Anti-Social Behaviour Orders), a terrifying yet oddly principled thug who's determined to teach him the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), internet porn ("me love life"), and all manner of more serious criminality. But just as Desmond begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, Lionel wins £139 million in the lottery, hires a public-relations firm, and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and poet. Strangely, however, Lionel remains his vicious, weirdly loyal self, while his problems as well as Desmond's seem only to multiply.
    Review quote
    "Despite a time frame that gallops forward into 2013 and a wealth of irresistibly hyperbolized pop cultural references, "Lionel Asbo" is at heart an old-fashioned novel, earnest in its agenda... a theme familiar to the audience of Amis's forebear, Dickens: the corrupting influence of money... Amis is, like Dickens, an insistently moral writer, satire being an edifying genre with a noble cause: the improvement of society." --Kathryn Harris, "The New York Times Book Review "(front page)" " "One of Amis's funniest novels --in a league with 'Money' and 'London Fields.' Amis, like his heroes Nabokov and Bellow, writes exuberant, ecstatic prose. His ear is precisely tuned, and his sentences--in narration and dialogue--are lethal. Our hero is a thug named Asbo (for Anti-Social Behaviour Order), a brilliant sociopath who delivers beatings for sport and feeds Tabasco to his pit bulls to make them extra-ornery in the morning. (Reader alert: Asbo delivers the most hilarious wedding speech in the history of English literature.) He sort of raises his nephew, an ambitious lad who happens to be sleeping with Grandmum. Mid-book, Asbo wins the lottery, a Dickensian turn of fortune that not only leads to some unforgettable comic opportunities but deepens matters as well. The jokes, the high-voltage sentences--all that energy--begin to drive an increasingly complicated machine." --"The New Yorker" ""Lionel Asbo" bears a strong resemblance to the trio of novels ("Money, London Fields, The Information") that made Amis' reputation. Like them, it is a satirical work whose subject is what Delmore Schwarz called 'the scrimmage of appetite, ' and has an elaborate plot, a series of brilliant set pieces and a matchless sense of the contemporary demotic. But "Lionel Asbo" maybe be even better than these ambitious works of fiction, more disciplined, funnier and more inventive.... To say that it is a return to form is an understatement--it might be his finest work." -John Broenin
    Biographical note
    MARTIN AMIS is the author of twelve previous novels, the memoir "Experience," two collections of stories and six of nonfiction, most recently "The Second Plane." He lives in Brooklyn.