Martin Amis

Tuesday

Ian Thomson

Zadie Smith muses on the artist-muse relationship

From our UK edition

Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in the UK to a Jamaican mother and a British father, and grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her novels and essays often conjure the polyglot confusion and vibrant streetscapes of Willesden in north-west London where she went to school. Dead and Alive takes us from her beloved Kilburn High Road (Afro-wig emporia, pound shops) to an appreciation of a Stormzy concert at Glastonbury. This fourth essay collection is unfailingly interesting: Smith is uniquely placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Some of the greatest essayists of the 20th century were American. (Only a wordy journal such as the New Yorker could accommodate the long stroll, as perfected by Gore Vidal.

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

My Martin Amis FOMO

There’s a form of social anxiety that a lot of people suffer from — FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. “Fear” suggests something imaginary, that isn’t really happening. Not so. I don’t fear missing out, because I know I am. Friends are always asking me: are you appearing at the Hay Literary festival? No! Am I speaking at the Idler festival? No! Am I reading extracts from my book at the Cambridge Literary festival? No! “What?!” they exclaim in mock disbelief — and then ask why I’m not appearing at some small, obscure, local village literary fête, somewhere in the rectum of rural England. I’ve gotten used to the seasonal snub from the lit-festival establishment. And there are literary events all over London that I haven’t been invited to as well. OK, I’ll live.

Amis

Tuesday

Sam Leith

To Salman Rushdie, a dream before his attempted murder ‘felt like a premonition’

From our UK edition

Salman Rushdie has long hated and struggled against the idea that the 1989 fatwa pronounced on him after the publication of The Satanic Verses should define his career or his life. It was, as he frequently pointed out, a book he published only a quarter of the way through his career. He wanted the life of a writer, and for his books – even ‘that book’ – to be read as books rather than as footnotes to an episode in his biography or tokens in some pre-digital culture wars. Two nights before the reading, Rushdie dreamt he was attacked by a man with a spear in a Roman amphitheatre He thought he had managed that. The only people who ever asked him about the fatwa, he told me when we met in 2020, were journalists: ‘to be dragged back into the late 1980s is boring.

Thursday

Philip Womack

The frustrating rise of celebrities ‘writing’ children’s books

When you are next visiting a bookstore, and find your way to the children’s section, you might be forgiven for thinking that there is no longer such a thing as a children’s author. Instead, you will be ambushed by piles of books blazoned with the names of actors, singers, comedians, DJs and people who generously exhibit themselves on social media. “Writing” a children’s book has become another string to the celebrity bow. Imagine the scene. You’ve married a prince, and opened a shop that sells vaginal eggs. What more is there to do? A-ha, thinks the celebrity, perhaps while she is sitting on a bench. All those untutored minds, eager for moi! My personal brand will bring them such joy, such self-worth! They will all feel seen!

chidren's

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Video games aren’t a total waste of time

From our UK edition

My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with my wife about video games. It is a total nightmare – and it’s one that in various versions will be replicated in houses with young children up and down the country. The problem, in part, is a cultural divide. It frustrates me, too, when the children refuse to come off Rocket League or Fifa when they’re told to (‘I’m in the middle of a game!’). I’m also wary of the addictive nature of these things. But at the same time I can absolutely see the point of them; as my outgoing, intelligent, football-loving, film-making wife cannot.

Saturday

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

The sex lives of writers

A fellow writer recently asked me if I would prefer to be famous as a great writer or famous as a great lover. I said a great writer because, well... that’s what you’re meant to say, isn’t it? My friend chose great lover. Why? “There are lots of great writers,” he explained, “but men who are great in bed are rare. And besides, great writers aren’t sexy anymore.” I used to think that when male writers — and I mean novelists, critics, journalists — complain about how literature has lost its cultural significance and that no one cares about the printed word anymore, what they really mean is: no one wants to shag me. And I suspect that they’re right. The era of the Great Literary Sex God is over.

writers

Friday

Alexander Larman

Hilary Mantel — a death before her time

When the Queen died a fortnight ago, it was widely speculated that the perfect writer to describe both her death and its aftermath was Hilary Mantel, but now that will never be. Mantel died from a stroke yesterday at the age of 70, leaving behind a unique legacy in transatlantic literature not merely as someone whose weighty novels about royalty in the Tudor era have sold millions, but as an acute chronicler of our own time, too. Not for nothing is her most controversial short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, a subversive account of what might have happened if a woman she felt "boiling detestation" for had been killed in 1983.

Friday

Neal Pollack

The Greatest Living American Writer on Salman Rushdie

In the late 1990s, author Neal Pollack developed an alter-ego character, "The Greatest Living American Writer," for the McSweeneys website, to satirize a generation of pretentious authors, particularly Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, as well as macho literary journalists. That character formed the basis of Pollack's first book, the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. The GLAW has since appeared in numerous other publications,  left- and right-wing and completely apolitical, surfacing and de-surfacing as the times demand. Now he's back in The Spectator World, until we get tired of him.  I have been the Greatest Living American Writer across eight decades of world literature and have seen many shocking acts of violence.

greatest living american writer salman rushdie

Monday

D.J. Taylor

Mart and marketing

George Orwell once proposed that the specimen literary career takes the form of a parabola in which the downward curve is implied in the upward. You can see immediately how this theory might work with a major-league titan such as Thackeray (promising early sketches leading to Vanity Fair, then downhill to the trackless waste of The Virginians) or James Joyce (peaks in the early stretches of Ulysses before descending to the dream language of Finnegans Wake). But how does it apply to the 71-year-old former enfant terrible and, to borrow another useful French phrase, one-time jeune premier of English fiction, Martin Amis?

martin amis