num_pages: 506
description: In this collection of essays and reviews spanning twenty-five years ofcriticism, Martin Amis asserts the writer's obligation to battle "not justcliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart." Hemarshals the forces of his infamous arsenal: his language, his wit, and hisintolerance for suffering fools to review, consider, and in some cases,condemn. He takes to task the best and the brightest, including Cervantesand Milton, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and Norman Mailer and ElmoreLeonard. From "Great Books" to "Some American Prose," from "PopularityContest" to the "Ultramundane," Amis parses the classics and theunconventional with the subversive brilliance he brings to everything hetouches. He also skewers myths about masculinity, with great skepticism and more thana dash of nose-thumbing humor. Unflinchingly, he lambastes the "superchargedbanality" of Elvis, the monumentally self-absorption of Andy Warhol, andAmerican squeamishness about movie violence. Evaluating the presentparticiple, casting a cold eye on the Guinness Book of Records, and thesacrosanct image of Abraham Lincoln, Amis astutely surveys our culturallandscape and fluctuates between celebration and castigation, with theprecision of a hypodermic.About the Author:Martin Amis is the best-selling author of several books, including LondonFields, Money, The Information, and, most recently, Experience. He lives inLondon.
language: English
title: The War Against Cliche : Ulysses, Don Quixote and Lolita
titlecomplete: The War Against Cliche : Ulysses, Don Quixote and Lolita
characters: Gore Vidal, Anatoly Kuznetsov, Nicholson Baker, Bryan Appleyard, William S. Burroughs, Andrei Bely, Paul Newman, John Milton, Leo Tolstoy, Jerry Falwell Sr., Dolores “Lolita” Haze, Humbert Humbert, Yasser Arafat, Elvis Presley, Gustave Flaubert, Saul Bellow, Lydia Bennet, Truman Capote, William Cooper, Ezra Pound, Thomas Harris, Ronald Reagan, Michael Crichton, V.S. Pritchett, A.N. Wilson, Nancy Mitford, Jack Ruby, Bill Clinton, Thomas Mann, Norman Mailer, Anthony Powell, Abraham Lincoln, John Betjeman, Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Stone, Fanny Price (Mansfield Park), Jack Henry Abbott, Gerty MacDowell, Beryl Bainbridge, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Carter, John Berger, George H.W. Bush, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Harold Acton, Hugh Auchincloss, James Atlas, Howard Austen, Cyril Connolly, Al Gore, Thomas Bernhard, Henry James, Chinua Achebe, George Orwell, George S. Kaufman, Evelyn Waugh, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Andy Warhol, Marcel Proust, Robert Graves, Hermann Hesse, Leir of Britain, Brian Aldiss, Samuel Beckett, Leopold Bloom, Steven Spielberg, Stewart Alsop, Angus Wilson, A. Alvarez, Nancy Reagan, Lee Harvey Oswald, Iris Murdoch, P.G. Wodehouse, Rush Limbaugh, Greta Garbo (The Prince of Beverly Hills), Philip Larkin, Anthony Burgess, Malcolm Allison, William Empson, David Irving, C.P. Snow, Kurt Vonnegut, John Carey, James Joyce, Christopher Isherwood, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Berger, Dmitri Nabokov, Malcolm Lowry, James Baldwin, J.G. Ballard, Karl Barth, Kingsley Amis, Peter Ackroyd, John Donne, Max Beerbohm, Bobby Fischer, John Updike, Stephen Dedalus
genres: Writing, Books About Books, British Literature, Unfinished, Nonfiction, Literature, Essays, Criticism, Journalism, Literary Criticism
ratings_count: 1532
places: Ladakh, Amarillo, Texas
awards: awardedAt: 978336000000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Criticism
publisher: Talk Miramax / Hyperion