{"product_id":"letters-of-kingsley-amis","title":"Letters Of Kingsley Amis","description":"\u003cp\u003eProduct Description\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003e`I have not laughed aloud at a book so frequently for a very long time…a major literary event’ David Lodge, Times Literary Supplement\u003cbr\u003e\nKingsley Amis was a prolific, brilliant and outrageous correspondent. In letters to friends like Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest he could unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, and as a result the more than 800 letters included in this volume contain some of his wittiest and most acerbic writings.\u003cbr\u003e\nThey reveal Amis’s youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his spectacularly successful first novel, Lucky Jim; his love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, and the subsequent souring of his second, to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; and his development into one of the country’s most revered, yet uniquely controversial, literary figures. Seldom can any writer have provided such a lively and coruscating self-portrait as is revealed by these letters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eReview\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003e‘You can put this book in front of people and watch them crack up’David Sexton, Evening Standard\u003cbr\u003e\n‘A bracing delight’Julie Burchill, Guardian\u003cbr\u003e\n‘Better than Evelyn Waugh’Economist\u003cbr\u003e\n‘A wonderful, wickedly enjoyable collection’Andrew Vine, Yorkshire Post\u003cbr\u003e\n‘Hugely entertaining’Katharine Whitehorn, Observer\u003cbr\u003e\n‘A feast’Blake Morrison, Independent on Sunday\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the Back Cover\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003e\"You can put this book in front of people and watch them crack up. Amis's letters contain some of his best writing – hilarious\"DAVID SEXTON, 'Evening Standard'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"Provokes outbursts of laughter… addictive, wicked and cant-free\"JULIAN BARNES, 'Sunday Times'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"Superbly funny, supple and moving\"HELEN DUNMORE, 'The Times'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"Full of jokes, squibs curses and indefensibly outrageous opinions… there are at least three laughs per page… The picture of their author that these letters paint is by turns savage and compassionate, brave and shrinking, loving and unforgiving\"JOHN BANVILLE, 'Irish Times'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"A bracing delight\"JULIE BURCHILL, 'Gaurdian'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"Hugely entertaining… These letters rollick along, adorned with rude drawings and often very funny spoofs of serious poems, spewing venom, lunacy and bawdiness in equal amounts. His denunciations, however unreasonable, are hypnotising… Kingsley's letters reflect exactly the same personality as his books: irascible, brilliant, rude, moving and exceedingly funny\"KATHARINE WHITEHORN, 'Observer'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"The Amis who emerges from these pages is an infinitely more complex and warm hearted man than his image ever allowed him in public… a wonderful, wickedly enjoyable collection… Amis fans will lap the letters up for their vigour, ebullience and insight into the mind of a man who was in the front rank of British novelists for forty years, and even Amis haters might find themselves smiling however much they try not to\"ANDREW VINE, 'Yorkshire Post'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"Better than Evelyn Waugh\"'Economist'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"The stylistic excesses of these letters go far beyond Ulysses, into the territory of 'Finnegans Wake' – though they are much more readable, and much funnier. The best are James Joyce crossed with Billy Bunter… one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art: an art of disinterested entertainment\"ANTHONY THWAITE, 'Sunday Telegraph'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"A feast… he was a great comic writer\"BLAKE MORRISON, 'Independent on Sunday'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"Vastly Entertaining\"JEREMY LEWIS, 'Independent'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"An engrossing collection, which no admirer of Amis's novels will want to be without\"ALLAN MASSIE, 'Daily Telegraph'\u003cbr\u003e\n\"Marvellously well written and entertaining\"RAYMOND EDWARDS, 'The Tablet'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eSir Kingsley Amis was born in 1922. He was the author of twenty-two novels, as well as numerous collections of short stories and non-fiction writings, anthologies of poetry and prose, and books on subjects as diverse as drinking, James Bond and science fiction. His first, hugely successful, novel Lucky Jim was published in 1954, and in 1986 he won the Booker Prize for T\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxfordbookstore","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45170364612787,"sku":"9780006387831","price":760.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0718\/4164\/4723\/files\/31WXeILg0hL.jpg?v=1765281408","url":"https:\/\/oxfordbookstore.com\/products\/letters-of-kingsley-amis","provider":"Oxfordbookstore ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}