The 3 best books by Kingsley Amis

At the time I stopped at martin amis. And it certainly seems unfair to me to forget the origins of his writer's splinter, drawn from a Kingsley amis from whom he could well have inherited and learned a trade developed in the end with greater profusion but perhaps not with as much brilliance.

Because Kingsley is one of the greats of 20th century English literature. And within a life full of vicissitudes, he managed to write some of the most representative works of his time. Perhaps his humorous side is more suited to the idiosyncrasies of English readers, but he is always happy to get lost in plots as interesting as those of this Amis.

In both the story and the novel, the original Amis finds ways to make his critical interest full of irony (that disguise between the humorous and the satirical) compatible with a literary vision full of humanism.

A kind of intimacy made in Amis, with its captivating sense of telling stories from the inside out, accommodating genres as diverse as science fiction, the most blatant humor to some version of James Bond. Always starting from the most significant and open subjectivity of its protagonists to the general scenario in which everything that has to happen fits into place ...

Top 3 Recommended Books by Kingsley Amis

Jim's luck

It is more than likely that the very Tom sharpe take some inspiration for your Wilt in this classic of English humor. In the first place because it was written years before, in 1954 than the first Wilt of 1976. Secondly, because the protagonists, Jim and Wilt are teachers with more fear than soul and more boredom than conviction about what they do ...

This ironic and scathing novel recounts the adventures of Jim Dixon, a nondescript medieval history professor at a provincial English university who awkwardly gets along with his colleagues as he tries to keep his brand-new second-grade professorial job and please his superiors. This is one of the funniest classics in the history of literature, a novel that became a popular myth in post-war Anglo-Saxon literature and has not lost one iota of its charm.

Jim's luck

Complete stories

This compilation brings together for the first time and in a single volume the entirety of the short prose of Kingsley Amis, one of the most recognized masters of the golden age of English narrative. A literary agent is the victim of a mysterious kidnapping. Some men create a time machine to try to find out what the drink tastes like in the future.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father makes a desperate attempt to prevent her marriage to the poet. A Cambridge Literature professor is actually a spy for MI5. Amis's stories are dark, playful, moving, surprising. Written over five decades, and never until now published in Spanish, these stories alternate genres such as mystery, horror or satirical reflections on life and unhappy love.

In them we will discover the best Amis: fine, satirical and scathing, extremely intelligent and with a relentless style that puts the possibilities of language to the limit. In the words of Terence Donovan, “Reading Amis is like having a drink of water after a hike in the desert. Or better yet, like drinking a beer, a bloody mary or a gin and tonic.

Complete stories

The old demons

Published in 1986 and awarded the Booker Prize, The old demons It is one of the great English novels of the second half of the XNUMXth century. When it seemed that he had finished his work, Sir Kingsley Amis surprised audiences and critics with this hilarious and acid work.

The novel tells the story of a group of Welsh friends whose lodged lives are suddenly altered by the unexpected return to the province of the Weaver couple, after a long and successful career in London. The reunion provokes delusional scenes, mixed sensations, time travel and crazy drunkenness. Alone with age, friends confront the demons of the past.

At the end of his life, Amis offered in this unforgettable novel a synthesis of his literary universe, as well as a high and sharp comedy about old age and friendship.

The old demons
5/5 - (11 votes)

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