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  2. Literary Essays
  3. Literary Studies: General
  4. Literary Studies: Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers
  5. Cultural Studies
  6. Popular Culture
The War Against Cliche
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The War Against Cliche : Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

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Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation. The War Against Cliche is a selection of his reviews and essays over the past quarter-century. It contains pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Philip Larkin, Joyce, Waugh, Lowry, Nabokov, F. R. Leavis, V. S. Pritchett, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Shiva and V. S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton, Thomas Harris - and John Updike. Other subjects include chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, juvenile violence, Andy Warhol, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher.show more

Product details

  • Paperback | 528 pages
  • 132 x 196 x 34mm | 498.95g
  • Vintage Publishing
  • VINTAGE
  • London, United Kingdom
  • English
  • 0099422220
  • 9780099422228
  • 86,656

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  1. Categories:
  2. Literary Essays
  3. Literary Studies: General
  4. Literary Studies: Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers
  5. Cultural Studies
  6. Popular Culture

Flap copy

Is there "anything that Martin Amis can't write about? In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and "Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches-not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. In The War Against Cliche," Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.show more

Review quote

"A tour de force in which every paragraph uncoils with vertiginous twists and turns, lightning metaphors, genuine learning, unstoppable laughter, and a passionate sense of literary pleasure" Independent "Amis's gifts - vigilance, wit, energy of language... A collection that reaffirms him as the suavest and funniest critic of his generation" Mail on Sunday "We have here a literary critic of startling power... Often being right and being funny are, in this book, aspects of the same sentence... Amis is the best practitioner-critic of our day - just what Pritchett was in his prime..." London Review of Books "[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache... Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading but also to a fascination with individual writers mature" New York Times "Brilliant prose... [Amis] proselytizes for talent by demonstrating it, by doing it... He is a master" New York Times Book Reviewshow more

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis is the author of thirteen novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction, most recently The Second Plane. He lives in New York.show more

Review Text

"Brilliant prose... [Amis] proselytizes for talent by demonstrating it, by doing it... He is a master"show more

Rating details

1,126 ratings
4.08 out of 5 stars
5 36% (408)
4 42% (473)
3 17% (193)
2 3% (38)
1 1% (14)
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