End Zone is Don DeLillo 's second novel, published in 1972.
92-550: It is a light-hearted farce that foreshadows much of his later, more mature work. Set at small Logos College in West Texas , End Zone is narrated in first person by Gary Harkness, a blocking back on the football team during the school's first integrated year. Critics are divided on the literary merit of End Zone . The novel is divided into three sections. In the first, Gary Harkness, the narrator, meets Taft Robinson, Logos College's first Black football player as well as Major Staley,
184-537: A Democrat for president since 1948 . The Rolling Plains to the east remained Democratic substantially longer: although Walter Mondale 's 1984 campaign lost Texas by 27.50%, he won three counties in this region. Since 2000, this region swung very rapidly toward the Republican Party due to its population's intransigent opposition to the liberal social policies of the Democratic Party, and by 2016, it had nearly
276-591: A clumsy spoof detective story and argue that it is an intellectual and intertextual joke that Amis plays on the critics who compare him with the American writers and criticise him for his sexist portrayal of women." The novel found other defenders too, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's mentor and friend Saul Bellow . It was adapted for the cinema in 2018 as Out of Blue . The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in
368-522: A collection of journalism, titled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016 , was published in October 2017. The second project, a new untitled novel which Amis was working on, was an autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet Philip Larkin , American novelist Saul Bellow , and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens . In an interview with livemint.com , Amis said of
460-521: A country house to take drugs. A number of Amis's writerly characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist , authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000, which Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw described as "boring, embarrassing, nasty and stupid – and not in
552-511: A full-time writer in 1980. Amis's best-known novels are Money , London Fields and The Information , commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy". Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape
644-479: A good one". Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation . His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters , began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: " Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought." In comments on the BBC in October 2006, Amis expressed his view that North Korea
736-755: A good way". Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically "pairing" characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money , Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information , and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train ). During this period, because producer Stanley Donen detected an affinity between his story and
828-926: A joy" and that he had "become very fond of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire ". He added that he "loved doing all the reading and the talking; and I very much took to the Mancunians. They are a witty and tolerant contingent". Amis was succeeded in this position by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín in September 2011. From October 2007 to July 2011, at the University of Manchester's Whitworth Hall and Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics ( 21st-century literature , terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin , science, Britishness, suicide, sex, ageing, his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow , violence, film,
920-544: A literary controversy for its approach to the material and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend Christopher Hitchens . Amis accused Hitchens – who was once a committed leftist – of sympathy for Stalin and communism. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the book in The Atlantic , his friendship with Amis emerged unchanged: in response to a reporter's question, Amis responded, "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that
1012-481: A master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". He was inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov , as well as by his father Kingsley Amis . Amis influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith . A life-long smoker, Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his house in the U.S. state of Florida in 2023. The New York Times wrote after his death: "To come of reading age in
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#17328767346291104-475: A morbid interest in the Holocaust which mirror's Gary's obsession. The novel ends with Gary being hospitalized for a mental breakdown, his future uncertain. A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews argued that DeLillo "seems to have at his natural command a kind of articulate mobility one cannot help but admire. [...] It's hard to take a body count of all those ideas which freefall off every page but then 'the thing to do
1196-574: A number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s including an international school in Mallorca, Bishop Gore School in Swansea , and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys , where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising". The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim (1954) sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey , in the United States, where his father lectured. In 1965, at
1288-401: A period of writing, rewriting, editing, and revision dating back to 2003, "by far the longest writing-time of all [his] books", Amis published The Pregnant Widow , a long novel concerned with the sexual revolution . Its title is based on a quote from Alexander Herzen : "The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening
1380-433: A prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for." Yellow Dog "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award. Following the harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog , Amis relocated from London to
1472-418: A vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them." He predicted that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants." It was revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university was £80,000 a year in return for 28 contracted hours. The Manchester Evening News broke
1564-410: A world where others accept defensive systems —technologies, religion, games, the large or small cultisms that flourish where fear is.” Anya Taylor at The City University of New York argued the book would endure, especially praising Gary's desert meditation on the end zone. Taylor discussed how the novel dramatizes certain limitations of language and negative social phenomena involving language (such as
1656-404: A young woman coming out of a coma. It was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice , and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine 's "Martian" school of poetry . It was also the first novel Amis published after committing to being
1748-402: Is a loosely defined region in the U.S. state of Texas , generally encompassing the arid and semiarid lands west of a line drawn between the cities of Wichita Falls , Abilene , and Del Rio . No consensus exists on the boundary between East Texas and West Texas. While most Texans understand these terms, no boundaries are officially recognized and any two people are likely to describe
1840-467: Is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow , because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child." The new novel took some considerable time to write: in 2008, Amis made
1932-400: Is centred on the lives of Desmond Pepperdine and his uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious lout and persistent convict; for the benefit of his US readers, Amis explained the origin of the latter's surname in an interview with NPR . It is set against the fictional borough of Diston Town, a grotesque version of modern-day Britain under the reign of celebrity culture, and follows the dramatic events in
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#17328767346292024-790: Is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. Amis's 1997 short novel Night Train is narrated by Mike Hoolihan, a tough woman detective with a man's name. The story revolves around the suicide of her boss's young, beautiful, and seemingly happy daughter. Night Train is written in the language of American ' noir ' crime fiction, but subverts expectations of an exciting investigation and neat, satisfying ending. Many reviewers subjected it to negative criticism, e.g., John Updike "hated" it, but others such as Jason Crowley writing in Prospect have applauded his attempt to write in an American idiom and Beata Piątek wanted "to discuss Night Train as more than
2116-454: Is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass." The first public reading of the then just completed version of The Pregnant Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival. At this reading, according to
2208-433: Is to walk in circles.' And occasionally pause. . . ." In The New York Times Book Review , Thomas R. Edwards deemed End Zone an improvement over Americana and said that the writing "is continuously energetic, shifty, fun to watch for its own sake.” Edwards also argued that "[Gary's] fever, casually introduced in the final paragraph, hints at the uncertain but possible value of vulnerability, persisting without certitude in
2300-851: The Chihuahuan Desert and is the aridest part of the state. Another part of West Texas is the Llano Estacado , a vast region of high, level plains extending into Eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle . East of the Llano Estacado lies the “ redbed country ” of the Rolling Plains , and south of the Llano Estacado lies the Edwards Plateau . The Rolling Plains and Edwards Plateau subregions act as transitional zones between eastern and western Texas. West Texas receives much less rainfall than
2392-592: The Permian Basin , the highest producing oil field in the United States. This likely inclines the region to support the Republican Party over the Democratic Party , as the latter supports environmentalism and action on climate change . Several counties in the Midland-Odessa area were some of the first parts of Texas to abandon the state's " Solid South " Democratic roots; two counties have not supported
2484-1003: The Texas Tech Red Raiders , and the UTEP Miners . NCAA Division II teams include the West Texas A&;M Buffaloes , the Texas–Permian Basin Falcons , and the Lubbock Christian Chaparrals and Lady Chaps . El Paso hosts the El Paso Chihuahuas , a AAA baseball team, and the El Paso Locomotive FC which plays in the USL Championship , the second tier of the American soccer pyramid . The Midland RockHounds and Amarillo Sod Poodles represent
2576-473: The arrow of time in the novel, a technique borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut 's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) and Philip K. Dick 's Counter-Clock World (1967), is a narrative style that itself functions in Amis's hands as commentary on the Nazis ' rationalisation of death and destruction as forces of creation with the resurrection of Nordic mythology in the service of German nation-building. The Information (1995)
2668-551: The defense industry . West Texas has become notable for its numerous wind turbines producing clean and alternative electricity . As of 2018, the West Texan economy was in a prosperous economic period , which has been described as the "West Texas oil boom". While there are no major league teams in the West Texas region, sports fans are faithful to their local high school and college teams. NCAA Division I college teams include
2760-536: The nom de plume "Henry Tilney" ( a nod to Austen ) in a column for The Observer . He found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement by the summer of 1972. At the age of 27, he became literary editor of the New Statesman , where he cited writer and editor John Gross as his role model, and met Christopher Hitchens , then a feature writer for The Observer , who remained Amis's closest friend until his death in 2011. According to Amis, his father
2852-400: The "debauched and nihilistic nature" of Dead Babies , Amis was invited to work on the screenplay for the science-fiction film Saturn 3 (1980). The film was far from a critical success, but Amis was able to draw on the experience for his fifth novel, Money , published in 1984. Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) – the title is a reference to Sartre's Huis Clos – is about
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2944-468: The "terrible decision" to abandon his first version and a much-different Pregnant Widow was not published until 2010. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane , a collection which compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror . The reception to The Second Plane
3036-474: The 1970s (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic increase in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection). In 2000, Amis published the memoir Experience , largely concerned with the relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. Amis describes his reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in
3128-651: The 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread , a devastating history of the crimes of Stalin and the denial that they received from many writers and academics in the West. The book precipitated
3220-607: The American Southwest at the same time, while the semiarid and desert climates of West Texas are clearly characteristic of the American Southwest . West Texas is often subdivided according to distinct physiographic features. The portion of West Texas that lies west of the Pecos River is often called "Far West Texas" or the " Trans-Pecos ", a term introduced in 1887 by geologist Robert T. Hill . The Trans-Pecos lies within
3312-466: The United States, stating: "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world." When briefly interviewed by the BBC during its coverage of the 2012 United States presidential election , Amis displayed a change in tone, stating that he was "depressed and frightened" by the US election, rather than excited. Blaming a "deep irrationality of the American people" for
3404-403: The adaptation also featured Vincent Kartheiser , Emma Pierson and Jerry Hall . The adaptation was a "two-part drama" and was written by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford. After the transmission of the first of the two parts, Amis was quick to praise the adaptation, stating: "All the performances [were] without weak spots. I thought Nick Frost was absolutely extraordinary as John Self. He fills
3496-460: The age of 15, Amis played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes 's A High Wind in Jamaica . At 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m) tall, he referred to himself as a "short-arse" while a teenager. His father said Amis was not a bookish child and "read nothing but science fiction till he was fifteen or sixteen". Amis said he had read little more than comic books until his stepmother,
3588-461: The apparent banality and futility of their lives. Amis wrote, "The world is like a human being. And there's a scientific name for it, which is entropy – everything tends towards disorder. From an ordered state to a disordered state." Money (1984, subtitled A Suicide Note ) is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century". "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed",
3680-698: The apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis said the Republican Party had swung so far to the right that former president Ronald Reagan would be considered a "pariah" by the present party – and invited viewers to imagine a Conservative Party in the UK that had moved to the right so much that it disowned Margaret Thatcher . He said: "Tax cuts for the rich, there's not a democracy on earth where that would be mentioned!" In 2015, Amis criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for The Sunday Times , describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated". In
3772-401: The author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there were only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, 'It's two against three, Martin's on
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3864-519: The author's "golden ear for the tin and tinsel of Americanese", Beckett also argued that "even isolated good satire can't hold together a disappointingly anticlimactic novel. DeLillo's buildup of suspense finally dissipates totally; many ominous hints are lost or forgotten by the end. [...] A season in the chaotic life of Gary Harkness, interesting as he is, does not suffice to make a satisfying whole." Chad Harbach lauded End Zone in 2004 as "a wonderful and underrated novel". Daniel Roberts highly praised
3956-462: The beach resort of José Ignacio, Uruguay , with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene. In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh novel. House of Meetings , a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also focused some consideration on
4048-411: The best young writers of his time, writing that the author was skilled at building scenes for comedic effect and praising the football game that is considered the novel's centerpiece as well as the pick-up game in the snow. Bill Beckett of The Harvard Crimson was less positive. While writing that End Zone has perhaps the best extended account of a football game ever written, and that the novel shows
4140-511: The boundaries of these regions differently. The historian and geographer Walter Prescott Webb has suggested that the 98th meridian separates East and West Texas; writer A.C. Greene proposed that West Texas extends west of the Brazos River . Use of a single line, though, seems to preclude the use of other separators, such as an area— Central Texas . Texas is part of the American South and
4232-506: The character. It's a very unusual performance in that he's very funny, he's physically comic, but he's also strangely graceful, a pleasure to watch ... It looked very expensive even though it wasn't and that's a feat ... The earlier script I saw was disappointing [but] they took it back and worked on it and it's hugely improved. My advice was to use more of the language of the novel, the dialogue, rather than making it up." London Fields (1989), Amis's longest and "most London" novel, describes
4324-532: The coverage of the event for the Writers' Centre Norwich by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an ageing man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write
4416-476: The covering of unpleasant truths through euphemisms , or the prevention of meaningful interaction through over-reliance on simplistic maxims ), and interpreted the novel as "a book about the decline of language under the bombardment of terms from thermonuclear warfare, and an attempt to revive language through an ascetic disciplined ritual of silence and self-loss". Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times stated that End Zone confirmed DeLillo as one of
4508-414: The day before his death. On writing, Amis said in 2014: "I think of writing as more mysterious as I get older, not less mysterious. The whole process is very weird ... It is very spooky." Interviewed by Sebastian Faulks on BBC television in 2011, he said that unless he sustained a brain injury , it was unlikely he would write a children's book: "The idea of being conscious of who you're directing
4600-400: The encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, "the fool, the foil, the poor foal" who is destined to come between
4692-489: The family home in north London – won the Somerset Maugham Award . It tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university; It has been described as "autobiographical" and was made into an unsuccessful 1989 film . Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in
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#17328767346294784-608: The last three decades of the 20th century – from the oil embargo through the fall of the Berlin Wall , all the way to 9/11 – was to live, it now seems clear, in the Amis Era." Amis was born on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital in Oxford , England. His father, novelist Kingsley Amis , was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham , London; his mother, Kingston upon Thames -born Hilary ("Hilly") Ann Bardwell ,
4876-481: The list'." A 2018 film of London Fields , on which Amis worked as a scriptwriter, suffered from a problematic production process and was critically and commercially unsuccessful. Amis's 1991 novel, the short Time's Arrow , was shortlisted for the Booker Prize . Notable for its backwards narrative, including dialogue in reverse, the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor. The reversal of
4968-568: The lives of both characters: Desmond's gradual erudition and maturing; and Lionel's fantastic lottery win of almost £140 million. Much to the interest of the press, Amis announced that the character of Lionel Asbo's eventual girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and poet "Threnody" (quotation marks included), had been created to honour the British celebrity Jordan , whom he had a few years earlier summed up as "two bags of silicone". In an interview with Newsnight ' s Jeremy Paxman , Amis said
5060-542: The most original comparison to draw, and the ending—or rather, the lack of one—makes it an ultimately unsatisfying read." In 2011, Martin Amis listed End Zone among his favorite novels in DeLillo’s output. Jeff Somers conversely ranked it 10th out of 17 of the author’s books, arguing that it was extremely funny but also that "there’s not much of a story here, and after meandering about for a while, it sort of just stops dead in its tracks." West Texas West Texas
5152-558: The movie was filmed there. Martin Amis Sir Martin Louis Amis FRSL (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog ). Amis
5244-456: The novel autobiographically, but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form." The story is set in a castle owned by a cheese tycoon in Campania , Italy, where Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old English literature student; his girlfriend, Lily; and her friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during the hot summer of 1970,
5336-463: The novel in a 2018 retrospective for The Paris Review , where he wrote, "No novel nails the omnipresent violence of football better than End Zone ". In 2007, however, the novel was listed by New York as one of the DeLillo's works that is "for fans only": "There’s little plot to speak of in this second novel, just a series of hilarious riffs on the parallels between football and nuclear war. That’s not
5428-554: The novel relates a series of black comedic episodes as Self flies back and forth across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of personal and professional success. Time included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005. On 11 November 2009, The Guardian reported that the BBC had adapted Money for television as part of its early 2010 schedule for BBC 2 . Nick Frost played John Self, and
5520-520: The novel was "not a frowning examination of England" but a comedy based on a "fairytale world", adding that Lionel Asbo: State of England was not an attack on the country, insisting he was "proud of being English" and viewed the nation with affection. Reviews, once again, were mixed. Amis's 2014 novel The Zone of Interest concerns the Holocaust , his second work of fiction to tackle the subject after Time's Arrow . In it, Amis endeavoured to imagine
5612-425: The novel-in-progress, "I'm writing an autobiographical novel that I've been trying to write for 15 years. It's not so much about me, it's about three other writers – a poet, a novelist and an essayist ... and since I started trying to write it, Larkin died in 1985, Bellow died in 2005, and Hitch died in 2011, and that gives me a theme, death, and it gives me a bit more freedom, and fiction is freedom. It's hard going but
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#17328767346295704-465: The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard , introduced him to Jane Austen , whom he often named as his earliest influence. He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford , with a congratulatory first in English, "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers". After graduating from Oxford in 1971, Amis wrote reviews of science-fiction novels under
5796-507: The one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things. I don't have them looking over my shoulder anymore." The finished product, Inside Story – his first novel in six years – was published in September 2020. Amis released two collections of short stories ( Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water ) and five volumes of collected journalism and criticism ( The Moronic Inferno , Visiting Mrs Nabokov , The War Against Cliché , The Second Plane and The Rub of Time ). While he
5888-575: The other two. The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his female characters. "It was an incredible row," Martyn Goff , the Booker's director, told The Independent . "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that
5980-479: The praise for House of Meetings , once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in The Independent , the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside two short stories – one, a disturbing account of the life of a body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein ; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta , the leader of the 11 September attacks – but late in
6072-412: The process, Amis decided to jettison both from the book." The same article asserts that Amis had recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (inspired by a phase used by Donald Rumsfeld ), in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of compulsive rapists on Greeley, Colorado . Instead he continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003: "The novel I'm working on
6164-658: The region in double-A baseball. Junior hockey is also present in the region, with the Odessa Jackalopes of the Tier II North American Hockey League. Except for the Trans-Pecos region, West Texas has become well known as a stronghold for conservative politics. Some of the most heavily Republican counties in the United States are in the region. Former U.S. President George W. Bush spent most of his childhood in West Texas. The region includes much of
6256-635: The rest of Texas and has an arid or semiarid climate, requiring most of its scant agriculture to depend heavily on irrigation. Northern portions of the area are irrigated with water from underground sources, such as the Ogallala Aquifer . Irrigation withdrawal, and water taken out farther north for the needs of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico , have reduced the Rio Grande to a stream in some places, even dry at times. Parts of West Texas have rugged terrain, including many small mountain ranges, while most parts of
6348-574: The same Cook PVI as the Panhandle. "West of the Pecos" has become a metaphor for the universe of Westerns . "Fastest draw west of the Pecos" and similar superlatives are a cliche, and the title character of Chisum observed "There’s no law west of Dodge, and no God west of the Pecos”. Cormac McCarthy 's novel No Country for Old Men and its subsequent film adaptation take place in West Texas, and much of
6440-642: The short story, and America). Amis married the American academic Antonia Phillips in 1984 and they had two sons together. Towards the end of that marriage, he met the writer Isabel Fonseca , whom he married in 1996; together they had two daughters. He became a grandfather in 2008; he later described his new status as "like getting a telegram from the mortuary". From 2004 to 2006, he lived with his second family in Uruguay, where Fonseca's father had been born. Upon returning, he said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I
6532-535: The social and domestic lives of the Nazi officers who ran the death camps, and the effect their indifference to human suffering had on their general psychology. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and a 2023 film , "loosely based" on the novel, premiered to acclaim at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival , winning the Grand Prix . In December 2016, Amis announced two new projects. The first,
6624-1689: The state are closer to sea level. The northern parts of West Texas and the higher elevations of the mountain ranges of the Trans-Pecos region are prone to occasional heavy snowfall during winter, whereas snow is less common in other areas of West Texas. The 72 counties of West Texas are Andrews , Bailey , Borden , Brewster , Brown , Callahan , Castro , Cochran , Coke , Coleman , Comanche , Concho , Crane , Crockett , Crosby , Culberson , Dawson , Deaf Smith , Dickens , Eastland , Ector , El Paso , Fisher , Floyd , Gaines , Garza , Glasscock , Hale , Haskell , Hockley , Howard , Hudspeth , Irion , Jeff Davis , Jones , Kent , Kimble , King , Knox , Lamb , Loving , Lubbock , Lynn , Martin , Mason , McCulloch , Menard , Midland , Mitchell , Motley , Nolan , Pecos , Presidio , Reagan , Reeves , Runnels , Schleicher , Scurry , Shackelford , Stephens , Sterling , Stonewall , Sutton , Taylor , Terrell , Terry , Throckmorton , Tom Green , Upton , Ward , Winkler , and Yoakum . Smaller West Texas cities and towns include Alpine , Andrews , Anthony , Brownfield , Canutillo , Coyanosa , Crane , Fabens , Fort Davis , Fort Stockton , Hale Center , Horizon City , Iraan , Kermit , Lamesa , Levelland , Littlefield , Marathon , Marfa , McCamey , Mertzon , Monahans , Ozona , Pecos , Post , Rankin , Ransom Canyon , San Elizario , Seminole , Slaton , Snyder , Sweetwater , and Van Horn . Major industries include livestock , petroleum and natural gas production, textiles such as cotton , grain , and because of very large military installations such as Fort Bliss ,
6716-434: The state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman. House of Meetings saw some better critical notices than Yellow Dog had received three years before, but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality. Despite
6808-468: The story saying that according to his contract Amis was paid £3,000 an hour for 28 contracted hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers. In January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year. Of his time teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester, Amis was quoted as saying, "teaching creative writing at Manchester has been
6900-407: The story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable ... I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write." The "brain injury" remark caused opprobrium among various children's authors, although the poet Roger McGough wagered that "if I gave him £100 to write a children's book I bet he'd do
6992-465: The teacher of his modern warfare class. This class sparks Gary's developing obsession with nuclear warfare . Gary begins dating Myrna Corbett and an assistant coach commits suicide just as the crowning game of the season approaches. The second section is solely a play-by-play retelling of the Big Game itself, where the main thematic content of the novel exists. DeLillo's disconnected, detached prose focuses
7084-413: The text on certain isolated images and dialogue throughout the game. The third section surrounds the aftermath of the game as well as the impact of the plane-crash death of Logos College's founder. Gary, filled with ennui after these events, plays a complex war game with Major Staley; the novel's metaphor of football as warfare is challenged in the line "warfare is warfare." Taft Robinson admits that he has
7176-438: The year that Amis says "something was changing in the world of men and women". The narrator is Keith's superego , or conscience, in 2009. Keith's sister, Violet, is based on Amis's own sister, Sally , described by Amis as one of the revolution's most spectacular victims. Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel since the publication of The Information in 1995, The Pregnant Widow
7268-516: Was "moving house" from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill. He also had a residence in Lake Worth Beach, Florida , United States. Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida on 19 May 2023. Like his father, he died at age 73. Amis was a life-long smoker. Amis was knighted in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for services to literature, with the knighthood being backdated to
7360-453: Was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's work centres on the excesses of " late-capitalist " Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature. He was portrayed by some literary critics as
7452-487: Was appointed as a professor of creative writing at the Manchester Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester , where he started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school. Of his position, Amis said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but ... I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such
7544-411: Was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes , who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiographical collection Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences. The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction: one, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels",
7636-432: Was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold relatively well but was not well received, particularly in the United States. In 2010, after
7728-404: Was deeply critical of certain aspects of his work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped [reading Amis's novel Money ] and sent it twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." Kingsley complained: "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself." His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) – written at Lemmons ,
7820-600: Was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reported that he was disquieted by what he saw as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States. In late 2010, Amis bought a brownstone residence in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn , US, although it was uncertain how much time he would be spending there. In 2012, Amis wrote in The New Republic that he
7912-432: Was met by searing criticism, accusations of sexism, and guessing the real-world identity of its characters. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews, and a general expectation that Amis's time for recognition had come, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize longlist. In 2010, Martin Amis was named GQ writer of the year. In 2012 Amis published Lionel Asbo: State of England . The novel
8004-507: Was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance of £500,000 (almost US$ 800,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, Pat Kavanagh , to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew Wylie . The split
8096-450: Was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder ... It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the novel's critical failure: "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with
8188-562: Was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May." In 2003, Amis published Yellow Dog , his first novel in six years. The book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but its reception was mostly negative. The novelist Tibor Fischer denounced it: " Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I
8280-494: Was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He had an elder brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally – for whose birth Philip Larkin composed "Born Yesterday" – died in 2000 at the age of 46. His parents married in 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was 12 years old; following the separation, Hilly and the children decamped to Mallorca , Spain, where they stayed for a while with Robert Graves . Amis attended
8372-513: Was the more dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis of Evil , but that Iran was Britain's "natural enemy", suggesting that Britain should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence". In June 2008, Amis endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama for president of
8464-622: Was writing Money , he wrote a guide to arcade video games of the 1970s and 1980s, Invasion of the Space Invaders . Amis regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes and contributed book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian , respectively. In February 2007, Amis
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