The War Against Cliche
  • Published: 1 June 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407018577
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528

The War Against Cliche

Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

Formats & editions
Paperback
5 Apr 2002
EBook
1 Jun 2010
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A remarkable collection of essays and reviews spanning Amis' literary career over three decades.

Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation. The War Against Cliché 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.
  • Published: 1 June 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407018577
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528
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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 The War Against Cliche

[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

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

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

New York Times Book Review

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