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A comic novel is a work of fiction in which the writer not only seeks to amuse the reader, but also to make the reader think about controversial issues, sometimes with subtlety and as part of a carefully woven narrative; sometimes, above all other considerations. It is more important to unmask the ideas or themes of a comic rather than just the simple plot.

Notable comic novel authors[link]

One of the most notable British comic novelists is P. G. Wodehouse, whose work follows on from that of Jerome K. Jerome and George & Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody. Saki's work is also significant although his career was cut short by World War I. A. G. Macdonell and G. K. Chesterton also produced flights of whimsy. Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, was a notable mid-18th century work in the genre. Other, more contemporary UK authors of this kind include Tom Sharpe, Kingsley Amis, Terry Pratchett, Richard Gordon, Rob Grant, Ian Ross, Douglas Adams, Evelyn Waugh, Nick Hornby, Eric Sykes, Leslie Thomas, Stephen Fry, Richard Asplin, Mike Harding, Joseph Connolly, and Ben Elton. James Joyce's Ulysses is also considered a comic novel with an underlining theme full of puns and a carefully crafted narrative style.

Notable American comic novelists include John Kennedy Toole, Robert Clark Young, James Wilcox, John Swartzwelder, Larry Doyle, Jennifer Weiner, Carl Hiaasen, Joseph Heller, Peter De Vries, Flannery O'Connor, and Terry Southern.

This literature-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Scott Pilgrim is a series of graphic stories by Bryan Lee O'Malley. It consists of six digest size black-and-white volumes, released between August 2004 and July 2010, by Portland-based independent comic book publisher Oni Press. It was later republished by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins^[1]. The series is about 23-year-old Canadian Scott Pilgrim, a slacker and part-time musician who lives in Toronto and plays bass guitar in the band Sex Bob-Omb. He falls in love with American delivery girl Ramona Flowers, but must defeat her seven evil exes^[2] in order to date her.

A film adaptation of the series titled Scott Pilgrim vs. the World starring actor Michael Cera in the title role was released in August 2010. A videogame of the same name developed by Ubisoft for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade was released the same month.

Development[link]

Bryan Lee O'Malley

Creator Bryan Lee O'Malley was inspired to create the series and eponymous character of Scott Pilgrim after listening to Canadian band Plumtree's 1998 single "Scott Pilgrim", a song then-Plumtree singer Carla Gillis describes as "positive, but...also bitter sweet."^[3] In particular, O'Malley was inspired by the lyric "I’ve liked you for a thousand years,".^[3]

O'Malley wanted to write a shōnen-style comic book series, but initially he had only read one series, Ranma 1/2; in the early 2000s the United States did not yet have a significant Japanese comic book industry. O'Malley gained inspiration from the book Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga by Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma. In 2002 O'Malley's roommate, who worked in a comic book store, brought the book to him while O'Malley was working on Lost at Sea and was planning Scott Pilgrim. Upon reading the book O'Malley realized that, despite the satirical tone, it could be an effective guide on how the Japanese comic book industry worked.^[4]

To ink, O'Malley usually used brushes, including No. 2 and No. 3 brushes. He mostly used computers to build the screentone; he stated that he encountered difficulty finding screentone in North America. O'Malley himself created most of the Scott Pilgrim material. When production on Volume 6 had began, O'Malley had hired two assistants. The backgrounds in Volume 6 are more detailed than backgrounds in the previous volumes. O'Malley said that "[m]ost fans don't seem to notice the change".^[4]

O'Malley stated that he wanted to create a "hybrid" work that received inspiration from American and Japanese comics, and that he "wanted to reach towards the japanese [sic] comics from my own starting point."^[4] When asked if he considers Scott Pilgrim to be a manga, O'Malley responded by saying "Um… No, I think I was just thinking about that today. I guess I was just thinking about the whole OEL thing. I think it’s influenced… I like the term “manga-influenced comics,” but I only like it because no one else likes it."^[5]

O'Malley said that he expected Scott Pilgrim to sell around 1,000 copies. He did not expect the series to sell millions of copies and to produce a film adaptation. O'Malley cited the United States comics industry and how it differs from the Japanese comics industry; the United States comic book companies specialize in superhero comics and many newer concepts originate from underground comics. The United States also lacks weekly and monthly comic book magazines and American comic companies generally do not have the system of story editors and assistants that Japanese comic companies have.^[4]

To illustrate his reasoning for eventually ending the Scott Pilgrim series, O'Malley used a quote from famed Belgian comics writer and artist Hergé, creator, writer, and illustrator of the well-regarded The Adventures of Tintin comic book series, from 1929 until his death in 1983. Hergé told his wife "And right now, my work makes me sick. Tintin is no longer me. And I must make a terrible effort to invent (him)… If Tintin continues to live, it is through a sort of artificial respiration that I must constantly keep up and which is exhausting me." O'Malley said "If I was still doing Scott Pilgrim in ten years, I would be dead inside."^[6]

The cover of the third Japanese Scott Pilgrim volume, which includes content from the original volumes 5 and 6, was based on an illustration from Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Street Fighter Zero 2).^[7] On March 31, 2012, O'Malley announced the series will be released in full-color hardback editions beginning August 2012 and concluding sometime in 2014.^[8]

[edit] Plot summary

This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. (October 2011)

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Volume 1)[link]

The series begins by introducing Scott Pilgrim, a 23-year-old Canadian slacker living in Toronto with his gay roommate Wallace Wells. He is the bass player for a band called Sex Bob-omb, along with his friends Stephen Stills "The Talent" (guitar) and Kim Pine (drums). He has recently started dating a 17-year-old Chinese-Canadian high-schooler, Knives Chau. Though his friends consider this somewhat scandalous due to her age, Scott doesn't see a problem, as all they ever do is talk. One night, Scott begins dreaming about a girl on rollerblades who he has never met before. He later glimpses her in real life and discovers that she is Ramona Flowers, a girl who has recently come to Toronto from New York after a rumored messy break-up with someone named Gideon. It is revealed that she can travel through an alternate dimension called "subspace" and that the purse she carries at all times is a portal to subspace as well. After Scott attempts to meet with her again, he receives an ominous email from someone named Matthew Patel, but Scott pays it little heed. Sex Bob-omb is preparing for a concert when Matthew Patel descends upon the stage and reveals himself as the first of Ramona's evil exes, who has mystical powers allowing him to summon "demon hipster chicks." Scott defeats him in a musical video-game-style battle, his final attack obliterating Matthew and leaving behind a handful of coins. Scott and Ramona decide to become a couple, provided that Scott agrees to defeat her six other evil-exes. When Scott asks if Gideon is one of them, Ramona's head glows.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Volume 2)[link]

Vs. The World opens with a flashback to seven years before the series begins. Scott and his friend Lisa Miller, high school students in Northern Ontario, want to start a band, but they need a drummer. This problem appears to be solved when Scott notices his classmate Kim's ability to play drums. When Scott finds out that Kim has been kidnapped by students from a rival school, he defeats the kidnappers and rescues her. Kim joins Scott and Lisa's band, and dates Scott until they break up when he moves to Toronto. In the present, Wallace tells Scott that actor and professional skateboarder Lucas Lee, Ramona's second evil ex-boyfriend, is filming a new movie in Toronto. Scott awkwardly breaks up with Knives after Wallace threatens to tell Ramona about her. Scott then meets Lucas at his filming location, where Lucas beats Scott up and tells him about the "League of Ramona's Evil Exes" who have organized themselves to come after Scott. Scott defeats Lucas by goading him into skateboarding down a dangerous set of rails, where he ends up going too fast and bursting into coins upon landing. Having discovered Ramona is dating Scott, a furious Knives gives herself a hipster makeover by dyeing her forelock and attacks Ramona at the library. Knives confirms that Scott was cheating on her and Ramona simultaneously, and takes off. Meanwhile, Scott gets a call from Envy Adams, another of his ex-girlfriends, who asks him to open for her band The Clash at Demonhead that weekend. Speaking with Envy reopens Scott's unresolved issues about their breakup. Nevertheless, Sex Bob-omb show up to see Envy's band. The book ends with an epic opening by The Clash at Demonhead, where Ramona identifies the band's bassist as her third evil ex-boyfriend, Todd Ingram.

Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness (Volume 3)[link]

The Infinite Sadness continues the night that The Clash at Demonhead performs. After the venue clears out, Envy invites Scott and his friends backstage. Disgusted by Envy's new personality, Scott blames Todd for changing her and tries to attack him, but is stopped by Todd's psychic vegan powers. A flashback reveals that Envy, formerly known as Natalie V. Adams, was a mousy girl who gradually bloomed into a confident musical talent. She broke up with Scott once their band started to get noticed. Two days later, Envy confronts Todd about his cheating on her with the band's drummer Lynette, but Todd strikes her with his powers, shocking everyone. Todd and Scott have a battle, which Todd almost wins until the Vegan Police show up and strip him of his powers for violating his vegan diet (by eating gelato). Scott headbutts the powerless Todd, who is reduced to a pile of coins, and receives an extra life in the process.

The Infinite Sadness also features extras, such as guest comics from Josh Lesnick, Alex Ahad, Andy Helms, John Allison, and David McGuire, as well as a map of the major characters illustrating their relations to each other. The title is a reference to the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Volume 4)[link]

Stephen asks Kim's new roommate Joseph to help Sex Bob-omb record an album. Meanwhile, on Ramona's recommendation, Scott gets a job at the restaurant where Stephen works. Over the next few days, Scott is attacked by a samurai, who he escapes via subspace portal, and a female "half-ninja", who is revealed to be Roxie Richter, Ramona's fourth evil ex. Ramona tells Scott that he can move in with her temporarily. Things go downhill when Ramona suspects Scott might be attracted to Lisa and kicks him out. Scott goes to Lisa's house to spend the night. After waking up from a dream infiltrated by Roxie in an attempt to kill him, Scott cannot remember the previous night, but learns from Lisa that nothing happened between them and that he confessed that he loved Ramona. The samurai is revealed to be Knives's father, who was not keen on Knives dating a white boy. When he attacks Scott again, Scott escapes via another subspace portal and ends up in Ramona's mind, where she is a slave to a shadowy figure. Ramona kicks Scott out of her head, telling him to forget what he saw, but before he can explain his true feelings, he sees that Roxie spent the night at Ramona's and his head begins to glow. Walking away, Scott encounters his dark self (the "NegaScott") and rejects it, rushing back to Ramona to find her being attacked by Mr. Chau. Scott lures him away and gets him to fight against Roxie. When Scott realizes that he has been cowardly, he confesses his love for Ramona, earning the Power of Love sword. Scott uses this to defeat Roxie, who warns him about "the twins" before dying. Mr. Chau leaves, having earned respect for Scott. Scott finally moves in with Ramona.

The back of Gets it Together features guest art from Steve Manale, Michael Comeau, Philip Bond, and Zander Cannon as well as a back cover illustrated by pixel artist Miguel Sternberg.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe (Volume 5)[link]

The gang attends a party where Ramona spots her next two evil ex-boyfriends, the twins Kyle and Ken Katayanagi. Scott and Ramona's relationship continues to deteriorate, with Ramona starting to appear bored and Scott stumbling onto signs that she may still be interested in Gideon. Later, Sex Bob-omb prepares for a show despite having had no rehearsals due to Stephen's persistent but fruitless recording with Joseph. While Scott fights a robot created by the twins, Knives tells Ramona that Scott cheated on them at the same time. Scott arranges to "bump into" Kim and Ramona over coffee, during which Kim brings attention to Ramona's head glowing; Ramona herself was unaware of this. Ramona confronts Scott about cheating on Knives with her and tells him he is just another evil ex-boyfriend waiting to happen. Scott then receives word that Kim has been kidnapped by the twins. When Scott confronts them, the twins explain that Ramona cheated on both of them at the same time, and imply Scott is fighting for the wrong girl. As Scott begins to lose the fight, Kim lies and says that Ramona text messaged her, giving Scott the encouragement to defeat the twins simultaneously. However, when Scott returns to Ramona, she tells Scott that she is a bad person and that she "had a good time." Her head begins to glow brighter and brighter until she disappears.

The end of Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe features a section called "Creating Scott Pilgrim for fun and profit." The section includes drawings and comments from Bryan Lee O'Malley detailing the development of the series, including a playlist for the fifth book.

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour (Volume 6)[link]

Four months after Ramona's disappearance, Scott has been wasting his life playing video games. In order to reinvigorate Scott to confront Gideon, Wallace sends him on a "wilderness sabbatical" to Kim's home up north. While walking in the woods, Kim tells Scott of the errors in his repressed memory surrounding their breakup; he never saved her from a kidnapping. Upon this revelation, Scott's head starts to glow and NegaScott emerges. Scott becomes determined to defeat him so he can forget his relationship with Ramona and move on, but Kim reminds him he cannot keep running away from his mistakes. Scott remembers Ramona and merges with NegaScott, fully remembering and accepting responsibility for his poor actions in his previous relationships. Scott heads back to Toronto to earn Ramona back.

Scott arrives at the newly-opened club, the Chaos Theatre, owned by Gideon, where Envy is making her solo debut. As Envy starts her performance, Gideon attacks Scott. When Scott refuses to join the League of Evil Exes, Gideon steals his Power of Love sword and kills him with it. Scott awakens in a desert, where he encounters Ramona and they reconcile. Scott returns to life thanks to the extra life he obtained from Todd Ingram. Ramona bursts out of his chest to confront Gideon. Gideon explains that the glow is an emotional weapon which seals people inside their own heads, consumed by self-loathing and personal demons. Scott jumps into Ramona's subspace bag and arrives in her head, where he confronts Gideon. Scott's actions encourage Ramona to fully overcome Gideon's influence and oust him from her head. Ramona retrieves the Power of Love sword. When Scott sees Gideon snap at Envy, he comes to understand that he has been no better than Gideon in terms of his past relationships. This realization earns him the Power of Understanding sword. When Gideon tries to turn Scott and Ramona against one another, they defeat him, causing him to explode into 7,777,777 coins, which rain painfully on the watching crowd.

Scott and Envy reach closure, and Ramona reveals that her disappearance was merely an unsuccessful wilderness sabbatical. She decides to give her relationship with Scott another shot. In the closing pages, Scott is working with Stephen as co-chef, Stephen reveals that he is gay and in a relationship with Joseph, Scott and Kim start an awful new band, and Knives heads off to college. The last pages show Scott meeting up with Ramona as they affirm their desire to face the challenges of a relationship and walk hand in hand into a subspace door together.

On June 3, 2010, O'Malley announced^[9] that he had hidden the word "hipster" on Ramona's t-shirt in one panel to mark the day he finished drawing the series. This panel is on page 161 in a flashback involving Ramona and Gideon.

[edit] Publications

The main graphic novel series is:

Other appearances:

• Comics Festival (40-page anthology including a one-page Scott Pilgrim comic; released on Free Comic Book Day 2005)
• PENG (72-page one-shot comic book by Corey Lewis where Scott Pilgrim appears in one panel; released in 2005)
• Free Scott Pilgrim No. 1 FCBD 2006 Edition (32-page comic book featuring an 17-page original Scott Pilgrim story; released on Free Comic Book Day 2006) This story is available for free online at the Scott Pilgrim Website
• Comics Festival 2007! (40-page anthology including a half-page Scott Pilgrim comic and a 4-page Wonderful World of Kim Pine comic; released on Free Comic Book Day 2007)
• Scott Pilgrim: Full Colour Odds & Ends 2008 (collects Free Scott Pilgrim #1 – newly coloured by Dean Trippe, Wonderful World of Kim Pine four-page story, Now Magazine Best of Toronto two-page strip in black-and-white, the Comics Fest 07 sushi strip, and various watercolours, pin-ups, and advertisements)

All of these ancillary stories are available to read on the Scott Pilgrim Website. A collector's box containing all six volumes and a fold-in poster was released in North America on November 3, 2010.^[13]

[edit] Critical reception

Publishers Weekly ranked the third volume, Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness, as one of the best comic books of 2006 in a critics' poll.^[14]

Scott Pilgrim was ranked 85th on Wizard magazine's 2008 list of the "200 Greatest Comic Characters of All Time".^[15]

In 2007, O'Malley was interviewed by the AV Club for the fourth volume. Written by Jason Heller, the article states that Gets It Together is "his best to date." The article goes on to praise O'Malley's consistent bold stylistic choices, saying that he "has raised the bar, art-wise: His deceptively basic style is suddenly deeper, richer, and more mature, while his eye for dynamics and graphic economy has gotten even keener."^[16] In 2011 Scott Pilgrim was ranked 69th in IGN's list of the top 100 comic book heroes.^[17]

Japanese comics author Kentaro Takekuma said in an interview that the structure and style of Scott Pilgrim initially did not match the structure and style of Japanese comics, but when he read the battle scenes "it feels very much like a Japanese manga, especially in how you structured the panels. It develops into a very strange, neither American nor Japanese atmosphere."^[4] Comics author Koji Aihara added that "I did feel the inspiration from Japanese manga, but it did not strike me as a ripoff of manga style, but a very unique way of expression, I found it a very interesting work. I appreciated you using your own style of expression. Also, I thought your use of solid blacks was very skilled and attractive."^[4]

Awards[link]

In 2005, O'Malley won the Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent for the first volume of Scott Pilgrim^[18] and was nominated for three Harvey Awards (Best New Talent, Best Cartoonist and Best Graphic Album of Original Work).^[19]

In 2006, O'Malley was awarded Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Cartoonist (Writer/Artist) in the Joe Shuster Awards. He was previously nominated in the same category in 2005.^{[citation needed]}

O'Malley was nominated for a 2006 Eisner Award in the category Best Writer/Artist—Humor, for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, but lost to Kyle Baker. O'Malley and Scott Pilgrim were also nominated for two 2006 Eagle Awards, and nominated for a second Wright Award (for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World).^{[citation needed]}

In 2007, O'Malley won the Harvey Award. The series was also awarded a spot in Entertainment Weekly's 2007 A-List.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, O'Malley won his first Eisner Award in the "Best Humor Publication" category for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe.^[20]

In other media[link]

Film[link]

The film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was released on August 13, 2010. It is based on all six volumes of the graphic novel series, despite the different ending due to the sixth volume having been released after the film finished shooting. The film is directed by Edgar Wright and stars Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Scott and Ramona, respectively.

The film was a critical success, but did not fare as well commercially. The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray and became popular to critical success.^{[citation needed]} The DVD includes extras such as bloopers and outtakes, deleted scenes and trailers. On the 2-disc edition, the 2nd disc includes soundtracks, animation (when Scott dates Kim), the film in the making and sound in the making.

[edit] Scott Pilgrim vs. The Animation

At the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, Alison Pill (who plays Kim Pine in the movie), revealed that her character's past relationship with Scott will be explored in other media. "There will be a little something-something that will air on Adult Swim," she said.^[21] Creator Bryan Lee O'Malley elaborated by stating "It's gonna be like a series of short animations (to promote the movie). One of them will be the Volume 2 high school stuff with Kim and Lisa Miller. I don't know how long it will be but the rough they showed me was like 5 minutes. The stars of the movie will do the voices for the cartoons."^[22] Michael Cera and Alison Pill reprise their roles of Scott Pilgrim and Kim Pine from the movie, whilst Mae Whitman and Jason Schwartzman, who play Roxanne Richter and Gideon Graves in the movie, provide voices for Lisa Miller and Simon Lee respectively. The animated short, entitled Scott Pilgrim vs. the Animation, was produced by Titmouse Inc. and aired on Adult Swim on August 12, 2010, later being released on their website.^[23][24] The short is based on the flashback from the second graphic novel, elaborating on Scott's adventures in high school. The animation features the song "Post Acid" by Wavves, though it is replaced with the movie's soundtrack in the version included on the DVD/Bluray Disc of the film.

Video game[link]

A video game based on the series, also titled Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, was announced during San Diego Comic Con 2009 and was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, released alongside the film. The game is a four-player side-scroller influenced by 8-bit and 16-bit video games, with players able to play as Scott Pilgrim, Ramona Flowers, Kim Pine and Stephen Stills (Knives Chau was added later as a downloadable character).^[25] If you complete the game with Scott, Ramona, Stephen Stills, and Kim, you unlock NegaScott. Mr. Chau, Knives Chau's father, is also an unlockable assist character. The game features music by chiptune punk band Anamanaguchi^[26] and visuals by Paul Robertson, who is well known for producing stylized sprite-based animations.^[27]

The game was released on PlayStation Network on August 10, 2010 and Xbox Live Arcade on August 25, 2010.^[28]

Mobile comic[link]

A mobile adaptation of the comic book was produced by HarperCollins and Robot Comics.^[29] The app uses movement, sound and vibration to create an original reading experience and includes extra material hidden in the scenes of the comic. It is available for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Android.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Scott Pilgrim

	Toronto portal
	Comics portal
	Video games portal

• Bryan Lee O'Malley's website
• ScottPilgrim.com
• Pilgrim on Myspace
• Scott Pilgrim on Ning
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World The Game at Ubisoft
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World at the Internet Movie Database

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Marjane Satrapi
Born	(1969-11-22) 22 November 1969 (age 42) Rasht, Iran
Nationality	French[1][2] and Iranian
Area(s)	Artist & Writer
Notable works	Persepolis Embroideries Chicken with Plums
Awards	full list

Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی) (born 22 November 1969 in Rasht, Iran) is an Iranian-born French^[1][2] contemporary graphic novelist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author. Apart from her native language Persian, she speaks English, Swedish, German, French and Italian.^[3]

Biography[link]

Satrapi grew up in Tehran in a family which was involved with communist and socialist movements in Iran prior to the Iranian Revolution. She attended the Lycée Français there and witnessed, as a child, the growing suppression of civil liberties and the everyday-life consequences of Iranian politics, including the fall of the Shah, the early regime of Ruhollah Khomeini, and the first years of the Iran–Iraq War. She experienced an Iraqi air raid and Scud missile attacks on Tehran. According to Persepolis, one Scud hit the house next to hers, killing her friend.

Satrapi's family are of distant Iranian Azerbaijani ancestry and are descendants of Nasser al-Din Shah, Shah of Persia from 1848 until 1896. Satrapi said that "But you have to know the kings of the Qajar dynasty, they had hundreds of wives. They made thousands of kids. If you multiply these kids by generation you have, I don't know, 10-15,000 princes [and princesses]. There's nothing extremely special about that."^[4] She added that due to this detail, most Iranian families would be, in the words of Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian, "blue blooded."^[5]

In 1983, at the age of fourteen, Satrapi was sent to Vienna, Austria by her parents to flee the Iranian regime. There she attended the Lycée Français de Vienne.^[6] According to her autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis, she stayed in Vienna through her high school years, staying in friends' homes, but spent two months living on the streets. After an almost deadly bout of pneumonia, she returned to Iran. She studied visual communication, eventually obtaining a master's degree from Islamic Azad University in Tehran.^[7]

During this time, Satrapi went to numerous illegal parties hosted by her friends, where she met a man named Reza, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War. She married him at the age of 21, but divorced him roughly three years later. Satrapi then moved to Strasbourg, France.

Satrapi is married to Mattias Ripa, a Swedish national. They live in Paris.^[5]

Career[link]

Graphic novels[link]

Satrapi's career began in earnest when she met David Beauchard, a French comics artist who became her mentor and teacher.^[8] Satrapi became famous worldwide because of her critically acclaimed autobiographical graphic novels, originally published in French in four parts in 2000–2003 and in English translation in two parts in 2003 and 2004, respectively, as Persepolis and Persepolis 2, which describe her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe. Persepolis won the Angoulême Coup de Coeur Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Her later publication, Embroideries (Broderies) was also nominated for the Angoulême Album of the Year award in 2003, an award which was won by her most recent novel, Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux prunes).^[9][10] She has also contributed to the Op-Ed section of The New York Times.^[11]

Films[link]

Marjane Satrapi at the premiere of Persepolis

Persepolis was adapted into an animated film of the same name which debuted at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in May 2007 and shared a Special Jury Prize with Silent Light (Luz silenciosa) by Carlos Reygadas.^[12] Co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and director Vincent Paronnaud, the French-language picture stars the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, and Simon Abkarian. The English version, starring the voices of Gena Rowlands, Sean Penn, and Iggy Pop, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in January 2008.^[13]

Persepolis was a very successful film both commercially (with over a million admissions in France alone) as well as critically, winning the Best First Film at the César Awards 2008. As such the film reflects many tendencies of first-time filmmaking in France (which makes up around 40% of all French cinema each year), notably in its focus on very intimate rites-of-passage, and quite ambivalently recounted coming-of-age moments.^[14]

Satrapi and Paronnaud continued their successful collaboration with a second film, a live-action adaptation of Chicken with Plums, released in late 2011.^[15][16]

Public appearances[link]

Following the Iranian elections in June 2009, Marjane Satrapi and Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf appeared before Green Party members in the European Parliament to present a document allegedly received from a member of the Iranian electoral commission claiming that the reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had actually won the election, and that the conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had received only 12% of the vote.^[17]

Works[link]

French[link]

• Persepolis (2000), Paris: L'Association, ISBN 2-84414-058-0
• Persepolis v2, (2001), L'Association, ISBN 2-84414-079-3
• Persepolis v3, (2002), L'Association, ISBN 2-84414-104-8
• Persepolis v4, (2003), L'Association, ISBN 2-84414-137-4
• Sagesses et malices de la Perse (2001, with Lila Ibrahim-Ouali and Bahman Namwar-Motalg, Albin Michel, ISBN 2-226-11872-1)
• Les monstres n'aiment pas la lune (2001, Nathan Jeunesse, ISBN 2-09-282094-X)
• Ulysse au pays des fous (2001, with Jean-Pierre Duffour, Nathan Jeunesse, ISBN 2-09-210847-6)
• Adjar (2002, Nathan Jeunesse, ISBN 2-09-211033-0)
• Broderies (2003, L'Association, ISBN 2-84414-095-5)
• Poulet aux prunes (2004), Paris: L'Association, ISBN 2-84414-159-5
• Le Soupir (2004, Bréal Jeunesse, ISBN 2-7495-0325-6)

English[link]

• "Persepolis" The Story of a Childhood (2003), New York: Pantheon Books, ISBN 978-0-375-42230-0
• "Persepolis" The Story of a Return v2, (2004), New York: Pantheon Books, ISBN 978-0-375-42288-1
• Embroideries (2005, Pantheon ISBN 978-0-375-42305-5)
• Chicken with Plums (2006), New York: Pantheon Books, ISBN 978-0-375-42415-1
• Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon (2006, Bloomsbury, ISBN 1-58234-744-1)
• The Sigh (2011, Archaia)

Awards[link]

• 2001: Angoulême Coup de Coeur Award for Persepolis^[18]
• 2002: Angoulême Prize for Scenario for Persepolis: Tome 2^[19]
• 2005: Angoulême Best Comic Book Award for Poulet aux prunes^[10]
• 2007: Jury Prize for Persepolis (tied with Silent Light), Cannes Film Festival^[12]
• 2007: Best Animation: Los Angeles Film Critics Association^[13]
• 2008: Cinema for Peace Award for "Most Valuable Movie of the Year"
• 2008: Gat Perich Award
• 2009: Doctor honoris causa both at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Université catholique de Louvain from Belgium^[20]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Chute, Hillary L. (2010). Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-15062-0. http://www.worldcat.org/title/graphic-women-life-narrative-and-contemporary-comics/oclc/496610090/viewport. Retrieved 6 September 2011. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Marjane Satrapi

	Biography portal
	Iran portal
	France portal
	Comics portal
	Literature portal

• Persepolis film (2008) official website, Sony Picture Classics
• Marjane Satrapi, author at Random House
• Marjane Satrapi biography on Lambiek Comiclopedia
• Persepolis: A State of Mind, reflections by Marjane Satrapi (2007)
• "Princess of Darkness", interview by Robert Chalmers, The Independent (1 October 2006)
• Marjane Satrapi interview at Bookslut (2004)
• Marjane Satrapi interview at Powells.com (2006)
• Marjane Satrapi interview at Reviewgraveyard.com
• "Bringing Iran To The West: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis" at The Culturatti
• The Comic World of Marjane Satrapi: Yearnings for a Lost Homeland

Martin Amis
Martin Amis in 2012
Born	(1949-08-25) 25 August 1949 (age 62) Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom[1]
Nationality	British
Education	MA (Oxon)
Alma mater	Exeter College, Oxford
Notable work(s)	Money (1984), London Fields (1989)
Influenced by	Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce[1]
Spouse	Antonia Phillips (1984–1993); Isabel Fonseca (1996–present)
Children	Delilah (1976), Louis (1985), Jacob (1986), Fernanda (1997), Clio (1999)
Parents	Kingsley Amis (father), Hilary Ann Bardwell (mother)
Relatives	Philip Amis (brother), Sally Amis (sister)

Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of several of Britain's best-known novels, including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.^[2] The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.^[3]

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness."^[4] Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."^[1]

Early life[link]

Amis was born in Swansea, South Wales.^[1] His father, Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Hilary "Hilly" Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant.^[4] He has an older brother, Philip, and his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents divorced when he was twelve.

He attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s—including the Bishop Gore School (Swansea Grammar School), and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys—where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising."^[1] The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured.

In 1965, at age 15, he played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.

He read nothing but comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often names as his earliest influence. After teenage years spent in flowery shirts and a short spell at Westminster School while living in Hampstead, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford with a "Congratulatory" First in English — "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers."^[5]

After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement, and at age 27 became literary editor of the New Statesman, where he met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for The Observer, who remained a close friend until Hitchens's death in 2011.

Early writing[link]

According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no interest in his son's work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself," Kingsley complained.^[4]

His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) won the Somerset Maugham Award. The most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.

He also wrote the screenplay for the film Saturn 3, an experience which he was to draw on for his fifth novel Money.

Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in a country house to take drugs. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000.

Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically 'pairing' characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train).

Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), about a young woman coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's 'Martian' school of poetry.

Main career[link]

1980s and 1990s[link]

Amis's best-known novels are Money, London Fields, and The Information, commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy."^[6] Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives.

Money (1984, subtitled A Suicide Note) is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century." "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed,"^[7] the novel relates a series of black comedic episodes as Self flies back and forth across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of personal and professional success. Time included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005.^[8] On 11 November 2009, The Guardian reported that the BBC had adapted Money for television as part of their early 2010 schedule for BBC 2.^[9] Nick Frost played John Self.^[9] The television adaptation also featured Vincent Kartheiser, Emma Pierson and Jerry Hall.^[9] The adaptation was a "two-part drama" and was written by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford.^[9] After the transmission of the first of the two parts, Amis was quick to praise the adaptation, stating that "All the performances (were) without weak spots. I thought Nick Frost was absolutely extraordinary as John Self. He fills the character. It's a very unusual performance in that he's very funny, he's physically comic, but he's also strangely graceful, a pleasure to watch...It looked very expensive even though it wasn't and that's a feat...The earlier script I saw was disappointing (but) they took it back and worked on it and it's hugely improved. My advice was to use more of the language of the novel, the dialogue, rather than making it up."^[10]

London Fields (1989), Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor foal' who is destined to come between the other two. The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his female characters. "It was an incredible row," Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told The Independent. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there was only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, 'It's two against three, Martin's on the list'."^[11]

Amis's 1991 offering, the short novel Time's Arrow, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Notable for its unique, backwards narrative - including dialogue in reverse - the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor. The unique reversal of time in the novel seemingly transforms Auschwitz - and the entire theatre of war - into a place of joy, healing, and resurrection.

The Information (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie.^[12] The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiography Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences.^[13] The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction. One, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels," is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. The novel is written in the author's classic style: characters appearing as stereotyped caricatures, grotesque elaborations on the wickedness of middle age, and a general air of post-apocalyptic malaise.

Amis's 1997 offering, the short novel Night Train, is narrated by the mannish American Detective Mike Hoolihan. The story revolves around the suicide of her boss's teenage daughter. Like most of Amis's work, Night Train is dark, bleak, and foreboding, arguably a reflection of the author's views on America. Amis's distinctively American vernacular in the narrative was criticized by, among others, John Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor and friend, the late Saul Bellow.^[14]

2000s[link]

The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in the nineteen-seventies (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic uptick in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection).

In the year 2000 Amis published a memoir titled Experience. Largely concerned with the strange relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.

In 2002 Amis published Koba the Dread, a devastating history of the crimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics in the West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach to the material, and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend, Christopher Hitchens. Once a passionate and committed leftist, Hitchens' alleged sympathy for Stalin and communism was criticized by Amis. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the book in The Atlantic, his friendship with Amis appears to have emerged unchanged: in response to a reporter's question, Amis responded "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."^[15]

In 2003, Yellow Dog, Amis's first novel in six years, was published. The novel drew mixed reviews, and was most notably denounced by the novelist Tibor Fischer: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder… It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."^[16] Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most considered the book to be a great disappointment.^{[citation needed]} Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for."^[17] Yellow Dog "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award.^[18]

Following the harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to Uruguay with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene.

In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh novel. House of Meetings, a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also saw some consideration of the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman. House of Meetings saw some better critical notices than Yellow Dog had received three years before, but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality while others felt that he was not suited to writing an ostensibly serious historical novel. Despite the praise for House of Meetings, once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in The Independent, the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside two short stories - one, a disturbing account of the life of a body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta, the leader of 11 September attacks - but late in the process, Amis decided to jettison both from the book."^[19] In the same 2006 interview, Amis revealed that he had "recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (the title was based on one of Donald Rumsfeld's characteristically strangulated linguistic formulations) in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of compulsive rapists on a town called Greeley, Colorado"^[19] and instead continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:^[20]

"The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child."^[19]

The new novel took some considerable time to write and was not published before the end of the decade. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a collection with compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror. The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold relatively well and was widely discussed and debated.

2010s[link]

In 2010, after a long period of writing, rewriting, editing and revision, Amis published his long-awaited new long novel, The Pregnant Widow, which marks the beginning of a new four-book deal. Originally set for release in 2008, the novel's publication was pushed back to 2009 and then 2010 as further editing and alterations were being made, expanding the novel to some 480 pages. A statement from publishers Johnathan Cape describes the content of the novel:

"The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete. Even today, in 2009, the pregnancy is still in its second trimester. Martin Amis, in "The Pregnant Widow", takes as his control experiment a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The result is a tragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of "Money" with the historical sense of "Time's Arrow" and "House of Meetings"."^[21]

The first public reading of the then just completed version of The Pregnant Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 at the Norwich Playhouse as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival.^[22] At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Norwich Writers' Centre by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an aging man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel autobiographically (something that has been interesting the press recently), but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction, and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form."^[22] Additionally, Amis "seemed quite happy reading the opening pages in the novel’s first public outing."^[22]

Further details concerning the novel's plot were revealed by The Times on 10 May 2009, its reporter Maurice Chittenden writing that at the event "Amis said the book was originally meant to be based much more closely on his own life. He had introduced more fictional passages after realising the format was not working," and that he "[had] been working on the partly autobiographical The Pregnant Widow for more than five years."^[23]

Chittenden writes that Amis said at the event regarding the length of the novel's protracted writing and creative gestation:

"In 2003 I tried for a couple of years [to make the novel more autobiographical]. I flailed about and it all felt awful. Bits were autobiographical but I had to completely rethink it. It was an uncontrollably long and pointless novel of 200,000 words. But the summer in Italy, I drew that out.”^[23]

In an 1 August 2009 interview with The Afterworld, Amis clarified the nature of some of the content of The Pregnant Widow and revealed that he is currently "writing two novels at the same time":^[24]

I started a novel [but] then I’m going to write a novella before I get on to it. But I was in big trouble a few years ago, with a huge, dead novel. And it took me a long time, and a lot of grief, to realize -- I thought I was clutching at straws -- it turned out it was actually two novels, and they couldn’t go together. So I wrote The Pregnant Widow, [that’s] one half of it, and the other half I started, and it will be very autobiographical, the next one.^[24]

Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel since the publication of The Information in 1995, The Pregnant Widow once again saw Amis receiving mixed reviews from the press and sales being average at best. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews, and a general expectation that Amis' time for recognition had come, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize long list (as were efforts by his contemporaries Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie).

Amis's next project is a novella currently titled State of England, and that will be followed by another full novel made up of some of the other half of the original draft of The Pregnant Widow.

[edit] State of England

On 27 October 2009, The Daily Telegraph reported that during a recent appearance by Amis at the Hay Festival in Wales, Amis had discussed his fascination with the glamour model turned celebrity author Katie Price (formerly known as Jordan). Amis went on to reveal that he "has honoured [Price] with a character bearing some of her traits" in his forthcoming novella provisionally titled State of England (also the title of a 1996 short story by Amis). Amis said that the character was named "Threnody."^[25]

Further details about State of England were revealed in an interview with The Times in late January 2010. According to the article, "[Amis has] nearly finished his next novel, State of England, about chavs, which contains one character, Threnody, inspired by Katie Price and another, “my worst yet”, he says, based on Mikey Carroll, a crack-smoking lottery winner. "Lionel Asbo wins £90m on the lottery and does something so vicious ... I can't tell you what."^[26]

Other works[link]

Amis has also released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water), four volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The War Against Cliché and The Second Plane), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines which he has since disavowed^[27] (Invasion of the Space Invaders). He also regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes, and contributes book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in their own right in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian, respectively.^[28]

Current life[link]

Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters. Amis became a grandfather in 2008 when his daughter Delilah gave birth to a son.^[29] He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.^[29]

In late 2010 Amis bought a property in the Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn, New York, although it is unclear whether he will be permanently moving to New York or just maintaining another 'sock' there.^[30]

Political opinions[link]

A conversation between Martin Amis and Ian Buruma on "Monsters" at the 2007 New Yorker Festival.^[31]

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."

He wrote in "Nuclear City" in Esquire of 1987 (re-published in Visiting Mrs Nabokov) that: "when nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe."

Amis expressed his opinions on terrorism in an extended essay published in The Observer on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in which he criticized the economic development of all Arab countries because their "aggregate GDP... was less than the GDP of Spain", and they "lag[ged] behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality."^[32]

The Catholic-Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology, singled out and attacked Amis for a particular quote (which Eagleton mistakenly attributed to one of Amis's essays),^{[citation needed]} taken the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, in an informal interview in The Times Magazine. Amis was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It’s a huge dereliction on their part".^[33] Eagleton wrote that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, [...] but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world".

In a highly critical article in the Guardian "The absurd world of Martin Amis" the satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employ "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Qu'ran" to incite hatred.^[34]

In a later piece, Eagleton added: "But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment."^[35]

Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating that:

A prominent British Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, wrote an op-ed piece on the subject condemning Amis and he responded with an open letter to The Independent which the newspaper printed in full. In it, he stated his views had been misrepresented by both Alibhai-Brown and Eagleton.^[37] In an article in The Guardian, Amis subsequently wrote:

On terrorism, Martin Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder," and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."^[32]

In comments on the BBC in October 2006 Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the most dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis Of Evil, but that Iran was our "natural enemy", suggesting that we should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War, because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence."^[38]

His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet Blitcon^[39] from the New Statesman (his former employer). This term, it has since been argued, was wrongly applied.^[40]

His political opinions have been attacked in some quarters, particularly in The Guardian.^[41] He has received support from many other writers. In The Spectator, Philip Hensher noted:

In June 2008, Amis endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, stating that "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world".^[43]

Agnosticism[link]

In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". Clearly, "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated", "so over our heads", that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.^[44]

In 2010, he said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe.... Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."^[45]

Recent employment[link]

In February 2007, Martin Amis was appointed as a Professor of Creative Writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester, and started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.^[29]

Of his position, he said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but...I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them."^[29] He predicted that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants."^[29] It was revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university was £80,000 a year.^[46] The Manchester Evening News broke the story claiming that according to his contract this meant he was paid £3000 an hour for 28 hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers. As with any other member of academic staff, his teaching contact hours constituted a minority of his commitments, a point confirmed in the original article by a reply from the University.^[47] In January 2011, it was announced that he would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year.^[48]

From October 2007 to July 2011, at Manchester University's Whitworth Hall or at the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Martin Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics (21st century literature, terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, suicide, sex, ageing, his novel The Pregnant Widow, violence, film, the short story, and America).^[49]

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Martin Amis

Novels[link]

• The Rachel Papers (1973)
• Dead Babies (1975)
• Success (1978)
• Other People (1981)
• Money (1984)
• London Fields (1989)
• Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence (1991)
• The Information (1995)
• Night Train (1997)
• Yellow Dog (2003)
• House of Meetings (2006)
• The Pregnant Widow (2010)
• The State of England: Lionel Asbo, Lotto Lout (2012)

Collections[link]

• Einstein's Monsters (1987)
• Two Stories (1994)
• God's Dice (1995)
• Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998)
• Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)
• The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)
• Vintage Amis (2004)