Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989. Chapter 3, The Epstein Papers: Writing a Second First Novel’, pp. 89-143, discusses Jacob Epstein’s alleged plagiarism of The Rachel Papers in his novel Wild Oats (1980). See also: Nichol, Don. ‘Rewriting Plagiarism’. Angelaki, 1:2 (Winter 1993/94), pp. 13-23.
Massie, Allan. The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970-1989. London and New York: Longman in association with the British Council, 1990, pp.46-8. (The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success, Other People, Money.)
Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Corrected edn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 409-15. (Success, Other People, Money.)
Taylor, D. J. A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s. London: Bloomsbury, 1989, pp. 103-6. (Money.)
Essays that focus wholly on Martin Amis
Essays which cover two or more Martin Amis novels/short story collections (where it is not clear from the essay title, Amis titles discussed are in brackets at the end of each entry).
Alexander, Victoria N. ‘Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov’. Antioch Review, 52:4 (Fall 1994), pp. 580-90. (Money; London Fields.)
Caputo, Nicoletta. ‘L’Etica della Forma: Strategic di Straniamento in Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) e Time’s Arrow (1991) di Martin Amis [The Ethics of Form: Strategies of Estrangement in Martin Amis’s Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) and Time’s Arrow (1991)]’. Confronto Letterario: Quaderni del Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne dell’Universita di Paviae, 21:23 (May 1995), pp.73-104.
Finney, Brian. ‘Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 37:1 (Fall 1995), pp. 3-15.
Hawkes, David. ‘Martin Amis (1949- )’, in George Stade and Carol Howard, eds. British Writers: Supplement IV. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997, pp. 25-44. (All Amis’s novels up to The Information: Einstein’s Monsters.)
Moyle, David. ‘Beyond the Black Hole: The Emergence of Science Fiction in the Recent Work of Martin Amis’. Extrapolation: A Journey of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 36:4 (Winter 1995), pp. 305-15. (‘Martin Amis’ Bibliography on MLA Database gives an incorrect first page no. of 304.) (Moyle states that it ‘is difficult to ascertain’ whether Martin Amis ‘was inspired by his father’s interest in … science fiction … or whether he was, or is, an “addict” of the genre’ (p. 305). As chapter six of this Guide (p.81) shows, however, Amis, according to his interview with David Profumo, was both a science fiction reader and, under a pseudonym, a reviewer of works in that genre.) (Einstein’s Monsters, London Fields, Time’s Arrow.)
Padhi, Shanti. ‘Bed and Bedlam: The Hard-Core Extravaganzas of Martin Amis’. Literary Half-Yearly (Mysore, India), 23:1 (January 1982), pp. 36-42. (The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies.)
Powell, Neil. ‘What Life Is: The Novels of Martin Amis’. PN Review 20, 7:6 (1981), pp. 42-5. (The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success.)
Stokes, Peter. ‘Martin Amis and the Postmodern Suicide: Tracing the Postnuclear Narrative at the Fin de Millennium’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (1997), 38, pp. 300-11. (Money; London Fields.)
Thomson, David. ‘Martin Amis (1949- )’, in Merritt Moseley, ed. British Novelists Since 1960: Second Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 194. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Detroit, Washington DC; London: Gale Research, 1998, pp. 7-18. (All Amis’s novels up to The Information; Night Train is listed in the Bibliography (p.7) but not discussed; Einstein’s Monsters.)
Essays that focus partly on Martin Amis
Titles of specific Amis novels discussions, and page references to Maln mentions within each essay, are given after each essay title.
Bernard, Catherine. ‘Dismembering/Remembering Mimesis: Martin Amis, Graham Swift’, in Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, eds. British Postmodern Fiction. Postmodern Studies series no. 7. Amsterdam - Atlanta GA: Rodopi Press, 1993, pp. 121-44. (Money, pp. 125-6, 137-8; London Fields, pp. 124-5, 129-31, 137-44; Time’s Arrow, pp. 133-4)
Brown, Richard. ‘Postmodern Americas in the Fiction of Angela Carter, Martin Amis and Ian McBwan’, in Ana Massa and Alistair Stead, eds. Forked Tongues: Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. London and New York: Longman, 1994, pp. 97-103. (The Rachel Papers, pp. 98-9; Dead Babies, pp. 99-100; Money, pp. 100-1; London Fields, pp. 101-3; Time’s Arrow, p. 103.)
Gilman, Sander L. ‘Love + Marriage = Death’, in Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel,
Ellen B. Berry, eds. Sex Positives: The Cultural Politics of Dissident Sexualities.
New York: New York University Press, 1997, pp. 197-224. (The Rachel Papers, pp. 216-17; The Information, pp. 217-19.)
Kemp, Peter. ‘British Fiction of the 1980s’, in Bradbury and Cooke (1992), pp.216-28. (Money, p.222; London Fields, pp.222-3.)
Lodge, David. ‘The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?’, in Bradbury and Cooke (1992), pp.203-15. (Success, p.210; Money, pp.208, 210; London Fields, p. 208.)
Robson, Ian. ‘Faking Emotion: Sentimentality in Modern Literature’, Essay no. 7 in Digby Anderson and Peter Mullen, eds. Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society. London: Social Affairs Unit, pp. 119-36. (London Fields, pp. 131-3; The Information, p. 133.)
On Money
Ashley, Leonard R.N. ‘“Names Are Awfully Important”: The Onomastics of Satirical Comment in Martin Amis’[s] Money: A Suicide Note’. Literary Onomastics Studies, 14 (1987), pp. 1-48.
Doan, Laura L. ‘“Sexy Greedy Is the Late Eighties”: Power Systems in Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money’. The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Committed Writing, 34-35 (Spring 1990), pp. 69-80.
Pacard-Huguet, Josiane. ‘De La Fiction Pornographique A L’Brrance Litteraire: Money de Martin Amis [From Pornographic Fiction to Literary Roving: Martin Amis’s Money]’. Etudes Anglaises, 50:2 (April-June 1997), pp. 244-56.
Todd, Richard. ‘The Intrusive Author in British Postmodernist Fiction: The Cases of Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis’, in Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema, eds. Exploring Postmodernism. Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature series vol. 23. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987, pp. 123-37.
On Einstein’s Monsters
Falconer, Rachel. ‘Bakhtin’s Chronotope and the Contemporary Short Story’. South Atlantic Quarterly, 97:3-4 (Summer-Fall 1998), pp. 699-732.
Mars-Jones, Adam. Venus Envy. Chatto Counterblasts series. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990, especially pp. 2-19.
On London Fields
Bernard, Catherine. ‘London Fields de Martin Amis: La Mimesis Revisitée [Martin Amis’s London Fields: Mimesis Revisited]’. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines: Revue de la Société d’Etudes Anglaises Contemporaines, 1 (December 1992), pp. 1-15.
Holmes, Frederick. ‘The Death of the Author as Cultural Critique in London Fields’, in Ricardo Miguel Alfonso, ed. Powerless Fictions? Ethics, Cultural Critique, and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism. Amsterdam -Atlanta GA: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1996, pp. 53-62.
Mills, Sara. ‘Working with Sexism: What Can Feminist Text Analysis Do?’, in Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber, eds. Twentieth-Century Fiction: From Text to Context, Interface series. London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 206-19.
Smith, Penny. ‘Hell Innit: The Millennium in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Martin Amis’s London Fields, and Shena Mackay’s Dunedin. Essays and Studies, 48 (1995), pp. 115-28.
On Time’s Arrow
Easterbrook, Neil. ‘I Know That It Is To Do with Trash and Shit, and That It Is Wrong in Time: Narrative Reversal in Martin Amis’[s] Time’s Arrow’. Conference of College Teachers of English Studies, 55 (1995), pp. 52-61.
Joffe, Phil. ‘Language Damage: Names and Naming in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow1. Nomina Africana: Journal of the Names Society of Southern Africa, 9:2 (October 1995), pp. 1-10.
Joffe, P
hil. ‘Martin Amis’[s] Time’s Arrow and Christopher Hope’s Serenity House. After Such Transgressions, What Reconciliation?’, in Hermann Wittenberg and Loes Nas, eds. Auetsa 96: Proceedings of the Conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa. University of the Western Cape, 30 June-July 1996: Volume 1: Southern African Studies.
Bellville, South Africa: University of Western Cape Press, 1996, pp. 200-12. (The discussion of Time’s Arrow here is to some extent the same as in the Joffe essay above.)
Marta, Jan. ‘Postmodernizing the Literature-and-Medicine Canon: Self-Conscious Narration, Unruly Texts, and the Viae Ruptae of Narrative Medicine’. Literature and Medicine, 16:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 43-69. (The Bibliography on the MLA Database gives the incorrect volume no. of 6.)
Menke, Richard. ‘Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow’. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 44 (1998), pp. 959-80.
Morse, Donald B. ‘Overcoming Time: “The Present of Things Past” in History and Fiction’ in Donald B. Morse, ed. The Delegated Intellect: Emersonian Essays on Literature, Science and Art in Honor of Don Gifford. American University Studies, Series XXIV, American Literature, vol. 57. New York: Peter Lang, 1995, pp.203-23.
Slater, Maya. ‘Problems When Time Moves Backwards: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow”’. English: The Journal of the English Association, 42:173 (Summer 1993), pp. 141-52.
On The Information
Howard, Gerald. ‘Slouching Towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of Publicity’. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 16:1 (Spring 1996), pp.44-53.
Nash, John. ‘Fiction May Be A Legal Paternity: Martin Amis’s The Information’. English: The Journal of the English Association, 45:133 (Autumn 1996), pp.213-24.
Reviews of and other press comment on Martin Amis’s novels
The Rachel Papers
Ackroyd, Peter. ‘Highway of Good Intentions’. Spectator, 231: 7587 (24 November 1973), p.674.
Prince, Peter. ‘Out of Afrika’. New Statesman, 86:2226 (16 November 1973), p. 744.
Dead Babies
Ackroyd, Peter. “Tirades’. Spectator, 25:7686 (18 October 1975), pp. 510-1.
Feinstein, Elaine. ‘Killing Time’. New Statesman, 90:2326 (17 October 1975), pp.479-80 (Dead Babies discussed on p.480.)
Mellors, John. ‘Raw Breakfast’. Listener, 30:2430 (30 October 1975), p. 582.
Success
Ableman, Paul. ‘Sub-texts’. Spectator, 240:2815 (15 April 1978), pp.23-4. Morrison, Blake. ‘Into Nastiness’, Times Literary Supplement, 3967 (14 April 1978), p.405.
Other People
Ableman, Paul. ‘Fairies and Violence’. Spedator, 246:7967 (21 March 1981), p.22.
Glendinning, Victoria. ‘Lamb’s Tale from Amis’. Listener, 105:2702 (5 March 1981), p.319.
Hollinghurst, Alan. ‘Opening Eyes’. New Statesman, 101:2608 (13 March 1981), p.2l.
Levin, Bernard. ‘Forgetfulness of Things Past’. Sunday Times (8 March 1981), p. 43.
Morrison, Blake. ‘In the Astronomical Present’. Times Literary Supplement, 4066 (6 March 1981), p.247.
Sutherland, John. ‘Making Strange’. London Review of Books, 3:5 (19 March-1 April 1981), p.2l.
Money
Korn, Eric. ‘Frazzled Yob-Gene Lag-Jag’. Times Literary Supplement, 4253 (5 October 1984), p. 1119.
Tennant, Emma. ‘Seriously Rich’. Literary Review, 77 (November 1984), pp.44-5.
London Fields
Fuller, Graham. ‘Murder He Wrote: Martin Amis’s Killing Fields’. Village Voice (24 April 1989), p. 75.
Imlah, Mick. ‘A Dart in the Heart’. Times Literary Supplement, 4513 (29 September-5 October 1989), p. 1051. (The bound volume of the Times Index: January-December 1989 (Reading: Research Publications, 1990), p.2l, gives an incorrect date of ‘SEPT 5’ for this issue.)
Pesetsky, Bette. ‘Lust Among The Ruins’. New York Times Book Review (4 March 1990), p.42.
Sante, Luc. ‘Cheat’s Tale’. New Republic (30 April 1990), p.46. Szamuely, George. ‘Something Amiss with Martin’. National Review, 42:10 (28 May 1990), pp. 46-8.
London Fields and The Booker Prize
Anon. ‘News’. Times Literary Supplement, 4524, Liber section (15 December 1989), p. 13.
Bragg, Melvyn. ‘A Novel Experience’. Sunday Times (17 December 1989), Section C, pp. 1-2.
Ellison, Jane. ‘Battle Fields’. Guardian (12 October 1989), p.2l.
Howard, Philip. ‘Booker Jury Omits Famous Authors’. Times (22 September 1989), p. 1.
Lodge, David. ‘The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads’, in Bradbury and Cooke (1992), p. 208.
Time’s Arrow
Anon. ‘Six Characters in Search of a Booker’. Sunday Times (29 September 1991), Section 7, pp. 10-11.
Harrison, M. John. ‘Speeding to Cradle from Grave’. Times Literary Supplement, 4614 (20 September 1991), p.2l.
Kermode, Frank. ‘In Reverse’. London Review of Books, 13:17 (12 September 1991), p.11.
Koenig, Rhoda. ‘Holocaust Chic’. New York Magazine (21 October 1991), pp. 117-8.
Scruton, Roger. ‘International Books of the Year’. Times Literary Supplement, 4628 (13 December 1991), p. 12.
Taylor, D.J. ‘Backward Steps’. New Statesman and Sotiety (27 September 1991), p.55.
The Information
Howard, Gerald. ‘Slouching towards Grubnet: The Author in the Age of Publicity’. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 16:1 (Spring 1996), pp.44-53.
Loose, Julian. ‘Satisfaction’. London Review of Books (11 May 1995), pp. 9-10.
Mars-Jones, Adam. ‘Looking on the Blight Side’. Times Literary Supplement, 4799 (24 March 1995), pp. 19-20.
Nash, Gerald. ‘Fiction May Be a Legal Paternity: Martin Amis’s The Information’. English: The Journal of the English Association, 45:183, pp. 213-24. (‘Martin Amis’ Bibliography on MLA Database gives an incorrect part no. of 133.)
Comment on Amis’s advance for The Information (see also ‘Interviews’ section above, entries for 1995-98)
Anon. ‘“I’m Looking for Money. Give Me Some. Go On. Do It”’. Sunday Times (8 January 1995), Section 3, p. 3.
Grove, Valerie. ‘How Amis Signed Up the Demon King [the American literary agent Andrew Wylie]’. Times (13 January 1995), p. 15.
Hillmore, Peter. ‘A Novel Way of Making a Fortune’. Observer Review (15 January 1995), p. 6.
Jones, Nicolette. ‘An Advance Taken Amiss’. Times (13 January 1995), p. 32.
Jones, Nicolette. ‘The Selling of Martin Amis’. Bookseller, 4648 (20 January 1995), pp. 10-11.
Lezard, Nicholas. ‘Counting the Cost of Martin’s Money’. Independent (11 January 1995), p.24.
Tonkin, Boyd. ‘Better Rich than Read’. Independent (18 December 1996), p. 13.
Young, Toby. ‘The Amis and Means’. Guardian (13 January 1995), p. 4. Night Train
Brookner, Anita. ‘Farewell, My Lovely’. Spectator, 279:8826 (27 September 1997), pp. 36-7.
Jones, Russell Celyn. ‘Unable to Do the Locomotion’. Times (18 September 1997), p.42.
Oakes, Philip. ‘Bloody and For Real’. Literary Review, 232 (October 1997), p. 50.
O’Brien, Sean. ‘Choo-Choo Time’. Times Literary Supplement, 4929 (19 September 1997), p.22.
Phillips, Adam. ‘Cloud Cover’. London Review of Books, 19:20 (16 October 1997), pp.3, 6-7.
Updike, John. ‘It’s a Fair Cop’. Sunday Times Books (21 September 1997), Section 8, pp. 1-2.
Walsh, John. ‘Where Did All the Book Editors Go?’. Independent on Sunday (28 September 1997), Section 2, p. 5.
Walter, Natasha. ‘The Gender Benders’. Guardian (29 July 1997), pp.4-5.
Heavy Water and Other Stories
Jones, Russell Celyn. ‘Not Such Light Reading’. Times (24 September 1998), p.40.
Walter, Natasha. ‘Fat Men, Thin Lives’. New Statesman (no volume or part no) (25 September 1998), pp. 81-2.
Film
The Rachel Papers (1989).
Written and directed by Damian Harris, with Dexter Fletcher as Charles Highway, Ione Skye as Rachel Noyce [sic], Jonathan Pryce as Norman and Michael Gambon as Dr Knowd. A moderately entertaining comedy of adolescence which wholly lacks the hard edge of the original novel.
An article in the Sunday Times of 23 August 1998 (Section 1, p.7a) announced that over the next twelve months, Hollywood was set to film four of Amis’s novels - Dead Babies, Money, London Fields and The Information, ‘despite [Amis’s] reputation as Britain’s most “unfilmable” author’. According to the Times of 17 June 1999, p. 39, director Nicolas Roeg has signed to film Night Train.
Websites
‘The Martin Amis Web’ http://martinamis.albion.edu
A valuable site, established by James Diedrick, the author of Understanding Martin Amis. It includes interviews, selected reviews, criticism, biography, bibliographies and a filmography.
The address of the associated ‘Martin Amis Discussion’ is http://amisdiscussion.albion.edu
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editor and publisher wish to thank the following for their permission to reprint copyright material: Methuen (for material from ‘Martin Amis’, in Novelists in Interview); University of South Carolina Press (for material from Understanding Martin Amis); Charles Scribner’s Sons (for material from ‘Martin Amis (1949- )’, in British Writers: Supplement IV); Longman (for material from ‘Postmodern Americas in the Fiction of Angela Carter, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan’, in Forked Tongues: Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature); The Spectator (for material from ‘Tirades’, ‘Sub-texts’, and ‘Farewell, my lovely’); PN Review (for material from ‘What Life is: The Novels of Martin Amis’); Times Literary Supplement (for material from ‘Into Nastiness’, ‘In the Astronomical Present’, ‘Frazzled Yob-Gene Lag-Jag’, and ‘Looking on the Blight Side’); Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (for material from ‘Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields’, and ‘Martin Amis and the Postmodern Suicide: Tracing the Postnuclear Narrative at the Fin de Millennium’); Oxford University Press (for material from Doubles: Studies in Literary History); John Benjamins (for material from ‘The Intrusive Author in British Postmodernist Fiction: The Cases of Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis’, in Exploring Postmodernism); The Minnesota Review (for material from “Sexy Greedy Is the Late Eighties”: Power Systems in Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money’); Literary Review (for material from ‘Interview: David Profumo Drops in on Martin Amis’); Chatto and Windus (for material from Venus Envy); South Atlantic Quarterly (for material from ‘Bakhtin’s Chronotope and the Contemporary Short Story’); The Guardian (for material from ‘Battle Fields’, and ‘The Gender Benders’); Essays and Studies (for material from ‘Hell Innit: The Millennium in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Martin Amis’s London Fields, and Shena Mackay’s Dunedin’), Editions Rodopi (for material from ‘The Death of the Author as Cultural Critique in London Fields’, in Powerless Fictions? Ethics, Cultural Critique, and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism); Peter Lang (for material from ‘Overcoming Time: “The Present of Things Past” in History and Fiction’, in The Delegated Intellect): Conference of College Teachers of English (for material from ‘“I know that it is to do with trash and shit, and that it is wrong in time”: Narrative Reversal in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow’); MFS: Modern Fiction Studies (for material from ‘Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow’); London Review of Books (for material from ‘Satisfaction’, and ‘Cloud Cover’); English: The Journal of the English Association (for material from ‘Fiction May Be a Legal Paternity: Martin Amis’s The Information’); Sunday Times (for material from ‘It’s a Fair Cop’); New Statesman (for material from ‘Fat Men, Thin Lives’).
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