num_pages: 528
description: 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.
language: English
title: The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
titlecomplete: The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
characters: John Betjeman, David Irving, Max Beerbohm, Nancy Reagan, William Empson, George S. Kaufman, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, A. Alvarez, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Harris, Hugh Auchincloss, James Baldwin, Al Gore, Elvis Presley, Karl Barth, William Cooper, Thomas Bernhard, Stewart Alsop, Dolores “Lolita” Haze, Thomas Berger, C.P. Snow, Chinua Achebe, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, Brian Aldiss, Rush Limbaugh, John Berger, Norman Mailer, Hermann Hesse, Nancy Mitford, John Milton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Updike, Humbert Humbert, Bill Clinton, Henry James, George H.W. Bush, Harold Acton, Steven Spielberg, Robert Graves, Lydia Bennet, Jack Henry Abbott, Nicholson Baker, Paul Newman, Michael Crichton, Anatoly Kuznetsov, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Truman Capote, Dmitri Nabokov, Malcolm Lowry, Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, John Donne, Stephen Dedalus, Marcel Proust, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Pritchett, Andy Warhol, Greta Garbo (The Prince of Beverly Hills), J.G. Ballard, Leo Tolstoy, Bobby Fischer, Philip Roth, Christopher Hitchens, James Atlas, Beryl Bainbridge, Yasser Arafat, Vladimir Nabokov, Oliver Stone, Ronald Reagan, Leopold Bloom, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, Fanny Price (Mansfield Park), Ezra Pound, Gerty MacDowell, Malcolm Allison, Bryan Appleyard, Peter Ackroyd, Christopher Isherwood, Leir of Britain, Thomas Mann, P.G. Wodehouse, John Carey, Gustave Flaubert, Angus Wilson, Jerry Falwell Sr., A.N. Wilson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Iris Murdoch, Andrei Bely, Abraham Lincoln, Jack Ruby, George Orwell, Howard Austen, Anthony Powell
genres: Essays, Unfinished, Literature, Criticism, British Literature, Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Books About Books, Journalism
ratings_count: 1531
places: Ladakh, Amarillo, Texas
awards: awardedAt: 978336000000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Criticism
publisher: Vintage