Kingsley Amis
Personal Information
Description
KingsleyAmis, the author of Lucky Jim, was born in the south of London in 1922. His first interest in literature was in the field of poetry. At the age of eleven he was writing verse, at the university he was one of the editors of Oxford Poetry 1949, and his own poetry has been published in two books: A Frame of Mind and A Case of Samples. His name is often to be seen in British newspapers and magazines as the writer of articles and reviews. Lucky Jim, published in 1954, was Amis's first novel. It was something so different, so fresh and so brilliantly clever that the critics welcomed it with excitement. Kingsley Amis is a university lecturer in English. In Lucky Jim he takes us into a world he knows well; it is set in a university college ' somewhere in England', but you need not have seen a British university to enjoy this book.
Books
Collected Poems
Lucky Jim
Amis’s debut novel, published in 1954, is a satire on academia. The protagonist is a bored and disinterested history lecturer at a provincial university, trapped in a joyless and sexless relationship with a depressive fellow lecturer. The book immediately elevated Amis to fame as one of the leading writers of his generation.
The Russian girl
A drawing room comedy featuring Richard Vaisey, an English expert on Russian literature, who falls for a Russian poetess. He is reluctant to leave his wife because she has lots of money and when he finally takes the plunge he discovers, to his regret, she also has lots of imagination--for revenge.
The folks that live on the hill
"Harry Caldecote is the most charming man you'll ever meet, a convivial academic who devotes his life to others. He is on call when his alcoholic niece falls into strange hands, when his brother threatens to emulate Wordsworth, when his son's lesbian lodger is beaten up by her girlfriend. He endures misplaced seductions, swindles and aggressive dogs just to keep the peace at the King's pub in Shepherd's Hill. But when the Adams' Institute of Cultural and Commercial History in America offers him the opportunity to do 'whatever he wanted to do' in a picturesque lakeside town, he faces a choice between freedom or responsibility - and whether to take charge of his own life." --abebooks.com.
Difficulties W/Girls
Thirty-seven-year-old Patrick Standish is unusually susceptible to temptation with other women, though his wife Jenny does not deserve the insult of his sporting ways.
The old devils
"When Alun Weaver and his wife, Rhiannon, a famous beauty in her day, move into a quiet retirement community, they find it peopled by friends from former days."--Audio cassette container.
Stanley and the women
As if it weren't terrible enough, Stanley finds himself beset on all sides by women - neurotic, half-baked, critical or just plain capricious. As one by one they gnaw away at his composure, Stanley wonders whether insanity is not something with which all women are intimately acquainted.
Russian Hide and Seek
A near-future dystopia showing Britain under repressive post-communist Russian rule.
The green man
A collection of stories and poems by a variety of authors relating to the Green Man and other myths of the forest.
The Alteration
An alternative history novel set in a world in which the Protestant Reformation never took place. Hubert Anvil is a singer in the choir of St. George's Basilica whose life is thrown into chaos when his teachers and the Church hierarchy decree that the boy's voice is too precious to sacrifice to puberty. Despite his own misgivings, he must undergo castration, the alteration of the title, in order to preserve it. Will he escape this turn of fate?