A selection of reviews and essays by Martin Amis, written over the past quarter-century. It contains pieces on a wide range of writers, from Cervantes to John Updike, and covers such subjects as chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, Andy Warhol, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher.[...]

In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janit[...]

The story of a life told backwards. Its narrator, Doctor Tod T. Friendly, trapped and hurtling towards a terrible secret, moves "out of the blackest sleep" to find himself surrounded by doctors and on the deathbed of a man in whose body he is imprisoned.[...]

Gregory leads an existence of formidable foppishness, his days and nights a series of effortless, titillating conquests. His foster brother, Terry, has to make do with the leavings as he trawls through life in a miasma of grief. But roles are reversed with both lives dramatically changed.[...]

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. [...]

How can one writer hurt another where it really counts? This is the problem facing novelist Richard Tull, contemplating the success of his friend and rival Gwyn Barry. Revenger's tragedy, comedy of errors, contemporary satire, The Information is an extraordinary novel of dark humour and piercing ins[...]

"Super-charged, anarchic and full of narrative acrobatics, "Money" burst on to the Eighties literary scene leaving a trail of imitators and devotees in its wake". ("Observer"). This is the story of John Self, consumer extraordinaire. Rolling around New York and London, he makes deals, spends wildly [...]

'Why aren't you out smashing windows? It's not healthy'. Lionel Asbo - a very violent but not very successful criminal - has always looked out for his nephew, Desmond Pepperdine. He gives him fatherly advice (carry a knife) and introduces him to the joys of Internet porn. Des, on the other hand, des[...]

The narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life... all Samson has to do is to write it as it happens.[...]

When she awakes and realizes she is all right, that Time is starting again, it seems fitting that she should lie on a spindly white trolley in a white room. A nearby voice tells she is on her own now and to be good. Was she not good before? This story unfolds a metaphysical thriller where jealously [...]

Hailed as "a sprawling, fierce, vulgar display" ("The New Republic") and "exhilarating, skillful, savvy" ("The Times Literary Supplement") when it made its first appearance in the mid- 1980s, "Money" is Martin Amis's hilarious portrait of one man's relentless pursuit of pleasure.
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Lionel Asbo - a very violent but not very successful young criminal - is going about his morning duties in a London prison when he learns that he has just won GBP139,999,999.50 on the National Lottery. This is not necessarily good news for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Des Pepperdine, who still [...]

There was an old story about a king who asked his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. Instead, it showed you your soul - it showed you who you really were. But the king couldn't look into the mirror without turning away, and nor could his courtiers[...]