Martin Amis

Martin Amis ā´mĬs , 1949-, English novelist; son of Kingsley Amis . The younger Amis, who turned from literary journalism to fiction, invites comparison with his father through his choice of career and style. Often writing satire so bitterly sardonic that it goes far beyond the caustic comedy of his father's fiction, he has exposed the darker aspects of contemporary English society in his novels. Among them are The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1975), Money (1984), London Fields (1990), Time's Arrow (1991), The Information (1995), and Yellow Dog (2003). His short-story collections include Heavy Water and Other Stories (1999). Among his nonfiction works are The War against Cliché (2001), a selection of essays, and Koba the Dread (2002), an examination of Stalinism's horrors and the attitudes of Western intellectuals toward the Soviet regime. His subsequent novel House of Meetings (2006) is a powerful fictional memoir that treats similar themes—the monstrous nature of the Soviet gulag and Stalinist atrocities. His collection of essays and stories, The Second Plane September 11 (2008), is collectively a polemic that condemns Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist terrorism.

Bibliography: See his memoir Experience (2000); studies by J. Diedrick (1995, repr. 2004), J. A. Dern (2000), G. Keulks (2003 and, ed., 2006).

Amis, Martin (1949– ) British novelist and journalist, son of Kingsley Amis. Amis' debut novel, The Rachel Papers (1974), won the Somerset Maugham Award. His humour is more bawdy and dark than his father's. Money (1984) is a stylish critique of the dehumanizing tendencies of capitalism. Einstein's Monsters (1987) is a collection of five short stories on nuclear war. Time's Arrow (1991) is a complex work on the holocaust. Other novels include Success (1978) and Night Train (1997). In 2000, he published his autobiography Experience.