Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions

About this book

A tantalizing collection of classic essays from one of the most gifted writers of his generation. "The brainy sarcastic tender intelligence at the center of these pieces can make you laugh out loud: they can also move you to tears." People Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit wickedly acute perception and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to Londons darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw. Throughout he offers razor-sharp takes on such subjects as: American politics: "If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb pale unhealthily dreamless: eight years of Do Not Disturb." Chess: "Nowhere in sport perhaps in human activity is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical.... My chances of a chess brilliancy are the chances of a lab chimp and a type writer producing King Lear." "His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity."John Updike