The Age of Acceleration / An Interview with Martin Amis

 

Martin Amis

The Age of Accelaration: An interview with Martin Amis

Martin Amis on poetry versus the novel and the vicissitudes of a literary career.

By Scott Timberg

June 21, 2018

WHILE HE’S BEST KNOWN for his novels — The Rachel Papers (1973), Money (1984), The Information (1995) — Martin Amis is one of the finest essayists and critics working in English today. His latest collection, The Rub of Time (2017), assembles pieces going back to 1994. It ranges across familiar subjects — favorite writers like Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, and Vladimir Nabokov; his late friend Christopher Hitchens; his father, Kingsley Amis — and some less obvious topics, like John Travolta’s Tarantino-era comeback or Southern California’s pornographic film industry.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub's childhood horror: "I knew more about fear and its first cousin terror, and pain, than children are normally expected to know"

BIOGRAPHY

Salon speaks to the veteran horror writer about bullying, H.P. Lovecraft and how dark he'll let his writing get

Scott Timberg
February 15, 2016

Horror writer Peter Straub is far more genial than anyone who writes such frightening and grotesque fiction should be. The Milwaukee native has a friendly Midwestern delivery even as he talks about acts of violence and the pain of his early years.

 

Nordic noir master Jo Nesbø takes another dark twist with ‘Knife’

BIOGRAPHY

BY SCOTT TIMBERG

JULY 10, 2019 7 AM PT

Detective Harry Hole takes on so much damage, physically and mentally, with each novel that it’s a wonder there’s anything left of him. In “Knife,” Hole — the troubled, brilliant protagonist of 11 previous books by Norway’s Jo Nesbø — is both a lady killer and a veritable human lie detector. (His surname is pronounced “hoo-leh.”) He’s someone who can, in Hole’s own words, pick up “the single false note in a symphony orchestra.” Sometimes, of course, it takes him a while. This is a long novel, heavy with characters, back story and Scandinavian angst, but never feels ponderous. It also manages to keep twisting until the last few pages.