Awards
An Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2001
Winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Synopses & Reviews
Is there anything that Martin Amis can?t write about? In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and
Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches — not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart.
In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.
Review:
"His reviews are astringent, punkily contemptuous, name-calling, reductive, pissy, prissy, preening. They are also (alas, alack) great fun to read."
Adrienne Miller, Esquire (
read the entire Esquire review)
Review:
"Most of the essays in this huge and admittedly uneven collection relentlessly, eloquently, and with enormous intelligence support Amis's contention that style 'is not something grappled onto regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception.'" Atlantic Monthly
Review:
"[A] great feast for serious readers..." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Review:
"Amis's critiques cover wide-ranging topics and are well worth reading....His evaluations are lively, scholarly, and, on rare occasion, numbing — though probably less so for those few who know as much about literature as Amis." Library Journal
Review:
"Amis gets you leaning forward so often you're paractically in italics. In the case of The War Against Cliché you first lean forward on the first page of the foreword. Whatever the book, there is no one whose review of it you'd rather read." The Guardian
Review:
"Amis is the best practitioner-critic of our day — just what Pritchett was in his prime...we have here a literary critic of startling power, a post literary-critical critic who, incorrigibly satirical, goes directly to work on the book." Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
Review:
"Distinguished by its hothouse intensity, its singleness of purpose, its nippy aggression — and its stylishness....Amis' journalism is narrowly focused but uncannily vivid — the details are fluorescent." The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"Amis is a force unto himself....There is, quite simply, no one else like him." The Washington Post
Review:
"Funny, impeccably calm, highly intelligent and almost never polite." USA Today
Review:
"[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache....Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading, but also to a fascination with how individual writers mature, how some distill their language and ideas, while others...misplace or misdirect their energies." The New York Times
Synopsis:
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.
About the Author
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