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  • Published: 29 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141961736
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528

Complete Stories





The definitive collection of Amis's astonishing stories, in Penguin Classics for the first time

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis's short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling. In 'The 2003 Claret', written in 1958, a time machine is invented for the weighty task of sending a man to 2010 to discover what the booze will taste like. In 'Boris and the Colonel' a Cambridge spy is unearthed in the sleepy English countryside with the help of a plucky horse, while In 'Mason's Life' two men meet inside their respective dreams. The collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. Amis's stories reveal the scope of his imagination and the warmth beneath his acerbic humour, and they all share the unmistakable style and wit of one of Britain's best loved writers.

With a new foreword by Rachel Cusk.

  • Published: 29 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141961736
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528

About the author

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis was born in south London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. After the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, including The Alteration, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, The Old Devils, winner of the Booker Prize in 1986, and The Biographer's Moustache, which was to be his last book. He also wrote on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in October 1995.

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Praise for Complete Stories

A key figure in postwar British culture, whose importance and influence cannot be measured ... distinctive and original

David Lodge

'Among the English comic masters of the twentieth century'

Guardian

A ceaselessly fresh and adorable body of work ... exasperation made poetry

Julie Burchill

Kingsley Amis was a big, humane novelist, interested in all manner of people very unlike himself

Philip Hensher
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