The Rub of Time - Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces 1986-2016

Author(s): Martin Amis

Essays

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction - his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis's heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump's rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.


Product Information

"He is our sure-footed mountain guide, leading us gleefully from one delight to the next in these quotation-rich encomiums. "Panegyric is rightly regarded as the dullest of all literary forms," he writes in Nabakov's Natural Selection, a scintillating panegyric that absolutely achieves its stated aim... The literary essays will leave you educated, enlightened, entertained... I defy anyone not called Tim to get to the end of the Henman-inspired essay, The Tims, without a helpless guffaw... Martin Amis is a great writer and a great reader." -- Claire Lowdon * Sunday Times * "First-class... Amis reveres Vladimir Nabokov, and wonderfully evokes the author's "miraculously fertile instability", and the "dazed hymns to the bliss of existence"... Amis's wide reading is prompted by pure pleasure and in this regard he is proudly Kingsley's son... Amis's literary criticism is richly enjoyable, his intellectual gifts are formidable and he is worthy of the praise he shovels upon Nabokov in his prime... His non-fiction is bayonet sharp... The Rub of Time is impressive. The inner world of the old devil on display is one to be treasured." -- Roger Lewis * The Times * "There is no one alive - with the possible exception of Adam Mars-Jones - who can hear an ailing sentence and diagnose its problems with such devastating and gleeful precision." -- Jon Day * Financial Times * "The reportage is some of the best stuff here. For someone who often doesn't much seem to care for journalists, Amis is a very good journalist indeed. If anyone has written a better, more penetrating, more open-minded interview with John Travolta, for example, I'd like to see it... When he puts his nose to a text, close up, there are few readers like him... And his is superbly good at capturing the nub of what's so interesting in DeLillo, deftly sectioning the phases of JG Ballard's career, tracing the weirdly wonky process of Philip Roth finding his voice or summing up a mood in a glancing phrase." -- Sam Leith * Observer * "A collection that shows Amis near his best." * Sunday Times *

Martin Amis is the author of ten novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction. He lives in New York.

General Fields

  • : 9781787330146
  • : Random House
  • : Jonathan Cape
  • : 0.553
  • : September 2017
  • : 234mm X 153mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : October 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Martin Amis
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 824.92
  • : 368