The Russian Girl by Amis Kingsley
Sex, booze, and Russian intrigue . . . A cool cocktail mixed with parts of Updike and De Vries, with a peel of le Carr .--The New York Times Book Review Richard Vaisey is a respected scholar specializing in Russian studies when Anna Danilova arrives on campus. A visiting Russian poet with a mission more than literary, Anna challenges his integrity--and his marriage. Richard's beautiful but unspeakably monstrous wife, Cordelia, seeks revenge on her adulterous husband, determined to ruin him by canceling his credit cards and reporting his car as stolen to the police. But Richard must face even further humiliating consequences, for the seductive Anna is also an irremediably bad poet. The Russian Girl is vintage Kingsley Amis: entertaining, thought-provoking, and wittily wise. A brilliant satire . . . Kingsley Amis can skewer the modern world like no other writer.--Los Angeles Times Book Review Genuinely entertaining, and corrosively funny . . . Amis's work is the result of beautifully organized and polished craftsmanship.--The New York Review of Books
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman's, he went to the City of London School on the Thames before winning an English scholarship to St. John's College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army's Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Amis spent a year as a visiting fellow in the creative writing department of Princeton University and in 1961 became a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, but resigned the position two years later, lamenting the incompatibility of writing and teaching (I found myself fit for nothing much more exacting than playing the gramophone after three supervisions a day). Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He had three children, among them the novelist Martin Amis, with his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell, from whom he was divorced in 1965. After his second, eighteen-year marriage to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard ended in 1983, he lived in a London house with his first wife and her third husband. Keith Gessen is a founding editor of N+1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country. Among his translations from the Russian are Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich and, with Anna Summers, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780670853298 |
| ISBN 10 | 0670853291 |
| Title | The Russian Girl |
| Author | Amis Kingsley |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Year published | 1994-05-26 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |