Einstein’s Monsters

Description

A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.

“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

“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

An 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.’

“Amis is first-rate; arguing inventing, demonstrating, parodying, being funny and shocking in the same breath”—Observer

 
MARTIN AMIS is the author of 15 novels—among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train—along with the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He died in 2023.US

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