num_pages: 288
description: A tantalizing collection of classic essays from one of the most gifted writers of his generation. • "The brainy, sarcastic, tender intelligence at the center of these pieces can make you laugh out they can also move you to tears." — PeopleMartin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London's darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw.Throughout, he offers razor-sharp takes on such subjects American "If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily eight years of Do Not Disturb." "Nowhere in sport, perhaps in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical.... My chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a type writer producing King Lear.""His fascination with the observable world is utterly he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity." —John Updike
language: English
title: Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions
titlecomplete: Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions
genres: Short Stories, British Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction, Literature, Essays, Contemporary, Criticism, Journalism, Literary Criticism
ratings_count: 773
publisher: Vintage