New Releases by Kingsley Amis

With Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis established himself as the bad boy of twentieth-century British letters. Later he became famous as another kind of bad boy, an inveterate boozer, a red-faced scourge of political correctness. He was consistent throughout in being a committed enemy of any form of “right thinking,” which helped to make him one of the most consistently unconventional and exploratory writers of his day, a master of classical English prose who was unafraid to apply himself to literary genres all too often dismissed as “low.” Science fiction, the spy story, the ghost story were all grist for Amis’s mill, and nowhere is the experimental spirit in which he worked, his will to test both reality and the reader’s imagination, more apparent than in his short stories. These “woodchips from [his] workshop”—as he called them—are anything but throwaway work. They are instead the essence of Amis, a brew that is as tonic as it is intoxicating.

A group of disgruntled septuagenarians prepare for their final days in this dark and “very funny” English novel about death and the inevitability of growing old (The Observer) Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis’s characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of life. There’s grotesque Adela, whose sole passion is her cheapness; her brother Brigadier Bernard Bastable, always strategizing a new retreat to the bathroom before sallying forth to play some especially nasty practical joke; Shorty, the servant, who years ago had a fling with the brigadier in the barracks and now organizes his day around a trail of hidden bottles; George Zeyer, the distinguished professor of history, bedridden and helpless to articulate his still-coherent thoughts; and Marigold, who slowly but surely is forgetting it all. And now it is Christmas. Children and grandchildren are coming to visit their ailing elders. They don’t know what lies in store before the story ends. None of us do. Ending Up is a grimly hilarious dance of death, full of bickering, bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts. It is a book about dying people and about a dying England, clinging to its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay.

A Parthian shot from one of the most important figures in post-war British fiction, The King''s English is the late Kingsley Amis''s last word on the state of the language. More frolicsome than Fowler''s Modern Usage, lighter than the Oxford English Dictionary, and brimming with the strong opinions and razor-sharp wit that made Amis so popular--and so controversial--The King''s English is a must for fans and language purists.

The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children”), and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.

Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonard Bernstein, is a pillar of the establishment whohas fallen hard for protest, bellbottoms, and the electric guitar. And since vain Sir Vandervane is a great success, he is also free to pursue his greatest failing: a taste for younger and younger women. Highborn hippie Sylvia (not, in fact, twenty) is his latest infatuation and a threat to his whole family, from his drama-queen wife, Kitty, to Penny, his long-suffering daughter. All this is recounted by Douglas Yandell, a music critic with his own love problems, who finds that he too has a part in this story of botched artistry, bumbling celebrity, and scheming family, in a time that for all its high-minded talk is as low and dishonest as any other.

The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous and “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author (The New York Times) Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral. Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death. The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.

BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick). In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.

In Kingsley Amis''s Take A Girl Like You, twenty year old Jenny Bunn is supernally beautiful and stubbornly chaste, which is why Patrick Standish, an arrogant schoolmaster, wants her so much. This perceptive coming of age novel about a northern girl who moves south, wants to fit in and yet wants to preserve her principles, challenges our assumptions about the battle of the sexes and classes in Britain. It is a story about ''the squalid business of the man and the woman'' and ''the most wonderful thing that had ever happened'' to Jenny Bunn. Few twentieth century novelists have explored our preoccupation with sex like Kingsley Amis. The results are surprising and often hilarious. Kingsley Amis''s (1922-95) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially in the period following the end of World War II. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment in novels such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955). His other works include The Green Man (1970), Stanley and the Women (1984), and The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories.

In Kingsley Amis''s Difficulties With Girls, Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish have settled into London life with their troubled courtship long behind them. Patrick works in publishing and Jenny teaches sick children in a hospital. They have reached a certain level of maturity, or so they think. It is not long before they realize their respectability will be severely tested by seductive neighbours with a taste for whisky, the sexually confused Ted Valentine, and the literary set of Hampstead. In this funny and provocative study of a young couple growing up, Amis shows us that the difficulty with marriage is that it''s so hard to preserve, especially when Patrick and Jenny harbour deep yearnings for a different kind of life. Kingsley Amis''s (1922-95) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially in the period following the end of World War II. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment in novels such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955). His other works include The Green Man (1970), Stanley and the Women (1984), and The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories.

In That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis, competition is stiff for the position of sub-librarian in Aberdarcy Library. For John Lewis, the situation is complicated by the attentions of daunting and desirable village socialite, Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams, who is married to a member of the local Council. Pursuing an affair with her whilst keeping his job prospects alive is John''s predicament, as he finds himself running down Welsh country lanes at midnight in a wig and dress, resisting the advances of local drunks and suffering the long speeches of a ''nut-faced'' clergyman. At times tenderly satirical and at times riotously slap-stick, Amis sends up an array of rural stereotypes in this story about a man who doesn''t know what he wants. Kingsley Amis''s (1922-95) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially in the period following the end of World War II. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment in novels such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955). His other works include The Green Man (1970), Stanley and the Women (1984), and The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories.

Booker Prize Winner A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post). Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.

In this hilarious, inspiring and provocative series of essays, Kingsley Amis introduces every reader to the wonders and value of science fiction writing. From the extraordinary ideas but sexless science of Jules Verne to the power of H. G. Wells''s terrifying storytelling; from the brilliance of bad science fiction writing to the potency of their important ideas; from a portrait of the average SF reader to Amis''s sad prediction that this genre will never make it in film or television, New Maps of Hell is a warm and witty exploration of a world many readers may be yet to discover.

''A brilliantly and preposterously funny book'' Guardian ''A flawless comic novel ... I loved it then, as I do now. It has always made me laugh out loud'' Helen Dunmore, The Times Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain''s new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons - as long as Jim can stave off the unwelcome advances of fellow lecturer Margaret, survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch''s, deliver a lecture on ''Merrie England'' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch''s awful son Bertrand. Inspired by Amis''s friend, the poet Philip Larkin, Jim Dixon is a timeless comic character, adrift in a hopelessly gauche and pretentious world, in a witty campus novel that skewers the hypocrisies and vanities of 1950s academic life. With an introduction by David Lodge

Gordon Scott-Thompson, a struggling hack, gets commissioned to write the biography of veteran novelist, Jimmie Fane. It is a task which proves to be fraught with extraordinary and unforeseen difficulties. Fane, an unashamed snob, has many pet hates, including younger men with moustaches and trendy pronuncation. Scott-Thompson, however, is extrememly attached to his own moustache and not so particular about his use of language. It doesn''t help matters that Fane''s wife Joanna isn''t yet sure what she feels about coustaches, but has decided views on younger men.

I en sydlig Londonforstad oplever unge Robin Davis i førkrigsårene alle ungdommens fortrædeligheder

Novel of the lives and mores of the elite, middle-aged, middle-class community living on, and around Primrose Hill.

Den engelske forfatters selvbiografi

Just when Stanley Duke thinks it safe to sink into middle age, his son, Steve, goes insane. As if that weren''t terrible enough, Stanley finds himself beset on all sides by women - neurotic, half-baked, critical or just plain capricious. As one by one they gnaw away at his composure, Stanley wonders whether insanity is not something with which all women are intimately acquainted.

A near-future dystopia showing Britain under repressive post-communist Russian rule.

In this hilarious, outrageous and wickedly funny story of Jake and his lost libido, Kingsley Amis does not pull any punches, but takes some well-aimed swipes at the crankier fringes of psychotherapy and at sex--1970s style.

Lunch at Scott''s, a quiet game of golf, a routine social call on his chief M, convalescing in his Regency house in Berkshire - the life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency ... until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped and his house staff savagely murdered. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island where the glacial, malign Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People''s Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-Nazi atrocity expert in a world-menacing conspiracy. Stripped of all professional aids, Bond faces unarmed the monstrous devices of Colonel Sun in a test that brings him to the verge of his physical endurance.