Einstein's Monsters

'In five cataclysmic stories Amis creates perplexing visions of a post-nuclear-holocaust world, highlighting schizophrenia, rape, brutality and suppurating despair' Daily MailAn ex-circus strongman, veteran of Warsaw, 1939, and Notting Hill rough-justice artist, meets his own personal holocaust and 'Einsteinian' destiny; maximum boredom and minimum love-making are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a 'father of the nuclear age'; evolution takes a rebarbative turn in a Kafkaesque love story; and the history of the earth is frankly discussed by one who has witnessed it all.The stories in this collection form a unity and reveal a deep preoccupation- '"Einstein's Monsters" refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves,' writes Amis in his enlightening introductory essay, 'We are Einstein's monsters- not fully human, not for now.'

“"In five cataclysmic stories Amis creates perplexing visions of a post-nuclear-holocaust world, highlighting schizophrenia, rape, brutality and suppurating despair." -- Daily Mail”

A phenomenal writer. He has style as quick and efficient as a flick-knife, and a gift for the grotesque that makes other people's nightmares look like Victorian watercolours Sunday Times
Amis is first-rate; arguing inventing, demonstrating, parodying, being funny and shocking in the same breath Observer
Amis's introduction to these five stories is a beautifully judged piece of polemic; a carefully reasoned emotionally charged attack on the unthinkable folly of nuclear war - an elegant, funny, moving book Daily Telegraph

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century - in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience - he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

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