Einstein's Monsters
  • Published: 2 July 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099768913
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.00

Einstein's Monsters

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'In five cataclysmic stories Amis creates perplexing visions of a post-nuclear-holocaust world, highlighting schizophrenia, rape, brutality and suppurating despair' Daily Mail

An ex-circus strongman, veteran of Warsaw, 1939, and Notting Hill rough-justice artist, meets his own personal holocaust and 'Einsteinian' destiny; maximum boredom and minimum love-making are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a 'father of the nuclear age'; evolution takes a rebarbative turn in a Kafkaesque love story; and the history of the earth is frankly discussed by one who has witnessed it all.

The stories in this collection form a unity and reveal a deep preoccupation: '"Einstein's Monsters" refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves,' writes Amis in his enlightening introductory essay, 'We are Einstein's monsters: not fully human, not for now.'
  • Published: 2 July 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099768913
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.00
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About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis was the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time’s Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. Amis died in May 2023.

portrait photo of Martin Amis

Also by Martin Amis

Inside Story
The Zone of Interest
Time's Arrow
The Rub of Time
The Rachel Papers
London Fields
The Information
See all

Praise for Einstein's Monsters

A phenomenal writer. He has style as quick and efficient as a flick-knife, and a gift for the grotesque that makes other people's nightmares look like Victorian watercolours

Sunday Times

Amis is first-rate; arguing inventing, demonstrating, parodying, being funny and shocking in the same breath

Observer

Amis's introduction to these five stories is a beautifully judged piece of polemic; a carefully reasoned emotionally charged attack on the unthinkable folly of nuclear war - an elegant, funny, moving book

Daily Telegraph