One Fat Englishman (New York Review Books Classics)
“This comic masterpiece about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s, is one of Amis’ greatest and most caustic performances.” –Kirkus Reviews“Amis’s funniest novel sinceLucky Jim.” —Newsweek“Very funny...splendidly slapstick...and serious too.... A satire of wit and intelligence that class it with the best.” —The Times Literary Supplement“The  book is an underhand attack on the Englishman at large.... Amis  gets  in a few telling swipes at Americans and nymphomaniacs and gourmets  and  the people in publishing business and anything you care to mention  and  manages at the same time to write a beautifully witty novel.” —Vogue“Whatever  happened to Lucky Jim? He got fat. That’s the answer Kingsley  Amis  gives us ten years and four novels on and many people are going to  find  it hilariously diverting. Rightly so.” —Birmingham Post“In  the light of Amis’s subsequent literary development, and all the  biographical information that has emerged since his death, it seems a  much more comprehensible and interesting novel—also much funnier, in its  black way, than I remembered....One Fat Englishmanis certainly a much less comfortable read thanLucky Jim, but no longer seems as inferior to it as I once thought.” —David Lodge,The Guardian “[Protagonist] Roger Micheldene is a fat, slothful, lecherous and  wrathful English publisher in the United States on as little business as  he can get away with. This novel chronicles his attempts to drink as  many drinks, eat as many meals and seduce as many women during his short  stay as is humanly possible.” —The New York Times Book Review “Mr. Amis is a subtle writer.... He has managed to write a commentary  on America without seeming to write a commentary on America.” —The Washington Post “The conversation is corrosive; and the characterizations, wickedly penetrating. Not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly “Roger Micheldene, the fat Englishman, who is the titular hero of  Kingsley Amis’s new novel, is easily the most repulsive figure that the  imaginative Amis has invented so far, and that is saying a good deal.” —Chicago Tribune “Like the early Evelyn Waugh, Amis has perfected the cool contemptuous  tone so necessary to the comedy of bestiality, an extreme form of  caricature that permits no faltering sympathy for its subject.  Technically, the novel is virtually without flaw.” —The Washington Post “Kingsley Amis writes of his fat Englishman with a mixture of contempt and sympathy. The sympathy is hard to share.” —The New York Times