The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

Martin Amis was one of the pre-eminent novelist-critics of his generation. This remarkable collection of essays and reviews spans over three decades of his literary career.

The War Against Cliché

A selection of Martin Amis's reviews and essays, this collection features pieces on a wide range of literary figures, including:

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.

Additional Subjects

Beyond literature, Amis explores topics such as:

Chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, juvenile violence, Andy Warhol, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher.

‘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