Author of the Day: Kingsley Amis



Lucky Jim is a favorite of mine, ever since I read it in college. Kingsley Amis's description of a hangover being like a huge raw egg rolling around inside Jim's skull has stayed vivid with me for years.

The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize, was a great novel about friendship, fame, identity, and booze. The Green Man was entertaining, although veered alarmingly into science fiction there at the end. The Alteration, an alternate history imagining England if there had been no Protestant Reformation, was a quick read that gave a lot to ponder.

Amis wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Those I have read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue. Many are out of print.

1947 Bright November (poems)

1953 A Frame of Mind (poems)

1954 Fantasy Portraits (poems)

1954 Lucky Jim

1955 That Uncertain Feeling

1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956

1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals (a Fabian Society pamphlet)

1958 I Like it Here

1960 Take A Girl Like You

1960 New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction

1960 Hemingway in Space (short story, Punch Dec. 1960)

1962 My Enemy's Enemy (short stories)

1962 The Evans County

1963 One Fat Englishman (reviewed here)

1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest)

1965 The James Bond Dossier

1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (as Lt. Col. William "Bill" Tanner)

1966 The Anti-Death League (Burgess favorite)

1968 Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure (as Robert Markham)

1968 I Want It Now

1968 A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957-1967

1969 The Green Man

1970 What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions

1971 Girl, 20

1972 On Drink (reviewed here)

1973 The Riverside Villas Murders

1974 Ending Up

1974 Rudyard Kipling and his World

1975 The Crime of the Century

1976 The Alteration

1978 Jake's Thing

1979 Collected Poems 1944-78

1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek

1980 Dear Illusion: Collected Short Stories

1983 Every Day Drinking (reviewed here)

1984 How's Your Glass? (reviewed here)

1984 Stanley and the Women

1986 The Old Devils

1988 Difficulties With Girls

1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill

1990 The Amis Collection

1991 Memoirs

1991 Mr. Barrett's Secret and Other Stories

1991 We Are All Guilty

1992 The Russian Girl

1994 You Can't Do Both

1995 The Biographer's Moustache

1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

2001 The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Edited by Zachary Leader

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Last updated on February 24, 2018.