The War Against Cliche
Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000
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Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the preeminent novelist-critic of his generation. Always entertaining, with a razor-sharp wit and inimitable judgment, he expounds on a dazzling range of topics from chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, to Andy Warhol, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Margaret Thatcher. The very best of his essays and reviews from the past twenty-five years are brought together in this substantial and wide-ranging collection, including pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Philip Larkin, Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, Nabokov, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Shiva and V.S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton,V.S. Pritchett and John Updike.
About this Author
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories, four works of non-fiction and a memoir. He lives in London.
Reviews
"[A] compulsively readable book ... Amis can turn his reviews into such fetching objects -- with his wit expensively bound in rich, calfskin diction -- that the results put us mere hacks on notice.... Funny, unflinching and near-undupable, Amis never misses a chance to frisk a book to within an inch of its pretensions." -- National Post
"[Amis] is a fanatically disciplined and craftsmanlike writer. He is a prose stylist, like Nabokov or Flaubert, an oarsman in the gilded barge." -- The Gazette
"[The War Against Cliché] confirms that in a merciless 30-year campaign, this verbally combative Brit has scored a decisive victory against the enervating forces of mediocrity and convention." -- eye (Toronto)
"Distinguished by its hothouse intensity, its singleness of purpose, its nippy aggression -- and its stylishness. . . . Amis' journalism is narrowly focused but uncannily vivid -- the details are fluorescent." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Amis is a force unto himself. . . . There is, quite simply, no one else like him." -- The Washington Post
"Funny, impeccably calm, highly intelligent and almost never polite." -- USA Today
"[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache. . . . Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading, but also to a fascination with how individual writers mature, how some distill their language and ideas, while others . . . misplace or misdirect their energies." -- The New York Times
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