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Koba The Dread
  • Published: 31 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781407018546
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

Koba The Dread

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 2003
EBook
31 July 2013
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'Indignant, angry, personal and strangely touching - Koba the Dread carries a punch, artfully delivered' New York Times

Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The author's father, Kingsley Amis, was 'a Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and later in life his closest friend, was Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror was second only to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.
  • Published: 31 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781407018546
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.
portrait photo of Martin Amis

Also by Martin Amis

Book of Lives
Inside Story
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Rub of Time
The Zone of Interest
Lionel Asbo
The Pregnant Widow
See all

Praise for Koba The Dread

A powerfully written, well-documented polemic reminding us of how 20 million humans were starved, murdered or totured to death by Uncle Joe

Daily Mail

Amis uses all the tricks of his well-mastered trade to make readable what is almost unreadable, indeed hardly bearable... A disturbing book...but a book I was very glad to have read

Financial Times

Martin Amis' book will not date...it is wise, witty and saturated with saeva indignatio, the only adequate response to tyranny

Literary Review

More than any of his contemporaries, Amis writes things that you want to remember and repeat: he is original

New Statesman

What's best about him is his style. He is never dull

John Carey, Sunday Times