Download or read book Lucky Jim written by Kingsley Amis and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lucky Jim written by James Hart and published by Cleis Press. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucky Jim is Jim Hart's memoir, the story of how he survived a violent childhood home, found incredible words inside him, created a love that was both so right and so wrong, and finally found the strength to be his true self. Jim is a master at building relationships. Charming, funny, and a great listener with a guru's insight, his success in life and business was based on his ability to connect with others, from people recovering in 12-step groups in Upstate New York to those living in the rarified air of Martha's Vineyard. But after 20+ years sober, one slip-up triggered an active addiction that threatened his relationships with his then-wife, singer-songwriter Carly Simon, his recovery friends, his severely disabled son, and even with himself as he began to confront his sexuality.
Download or read book Everyday Drinking written by Kingsley Amis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-08-09 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the beloved, bestselling compendium of Kingsley Amis's wisdom on the cherished subject of drinking. Along with a series of well-tested recipes (including a cocktail called the Lucky Jim) the book includes Amis's musings on The Hangover, The Boozing Man's Diet, The Mean Sod's Guide, and (presumably as a matter of speculation) How Not to Get Drunk-all leavened with fun quizzes on the making and drinking of alcohol all over the world. Mixing practical know-how and hilarious opinionation, this is a delightful cocktail of wry humor and distilled knowledge, served by one of our great gimlet wits.
Download or read book Big Lucky written by Jim Markham and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memoir and entrepreneurial steps to succeed...With 5 successful companies to his name and over $1.2 billion in combined retail sales, serial entrepreneur, Jim Markham has made an indelible mark on the hair care industry. Across 6 decades he has built a legacy of innovation, creator of Sulfate-Free hair care - and other innovation that has changed how people care for their hair.
Download or read book Take a Girl Like You written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take a Girl Like You may well be Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious reckoning with the serious subject at the heart of his work: the sheer squalor—emotional, material, sexual, you name it—of modern life. It also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis’s rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a girl from the (English) north country come south to teach school in a small smug town where she hopes to find love and fortune. Jenny is a beauty and men and women are crazy about her, most of all handsome Patrick Standish, who Jenny also likes. But Jenny and Patrick live in a world where it’s becoming ridiculously difficult—disastrously difficult—to sort out the claims of sex and the claims of love.
Download or read book The Green Man written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous and “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author (The New York Times) Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral. Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death. The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.
Download or read book Lucky Jim written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hilarious satire about college life and high class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature. Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics, with each of whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy. More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy post-war manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “if you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”
Download or read book One Fat Englishman written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children”), and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.
Download or read book The Old Devils written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Booker Prize Winner A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post). Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
Download or read book Jimmy Batten written by V. Bennett and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in the poverty stricken, and crime filled streets of post war London's East End. Jimmy rose above all odds to claw his way out of the burdens laid on his feet, At 12 he became the UK schoolboy Champion, he never lost a fight for 3 years, turning pro he fought for and won the British Welterweight title, winning the Lonsdale Belt outright. Boxing in America, he was diagnosed with a brain bleed and aneurisms and told not to continue boxing or he would die. He kept this secret hanging over him like the sword of Damaclese whist being hit by, and knocking out, the worlds toughest fighters. When unable to remember where he was in the ring his secret was out. Undeterred when the boxing door slammed in his face he took speech therapy and acting lessons and went into film and TV. When he lost his way home from the film set he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Profoundly deaf in both ears he took singing lessons and bought the best hearing aids he could and became a singer compere/comedian. Now touring for the benefit of old people who he entertains in their old peoples homes, whilst working for children's charities. His inspirational motto is "You win some you lose some but you never give in"
Download or read book On Rereading written by Patricia Meyer Spacks and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.
Download or read book Dear Committee Members written by Julie Schumacher and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Like Richard Russo’s Straight Man this book has a lot to say about the humanities in American colleges and universities…. Very funny and also moving.” —Tom Perrotta, New York Post A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR and Boston Globe Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary." Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies. We recommend Dear Committee Members to you in the strongest possible terms. Don’t miss Julie Schumacher's new novel, The English Experience, coming soon.
Download or read book Ending Up written by Kingsley Amis and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage in the English countryside, five elderly people live together in rancorous disharmony. Adela Bastable bosses the house, as her brother Bernard passes his days thinking up malicious schemes against the baby-talking Marigold and secret drinker Shorty, while kindly George lies bedridden upstairs. The mismatched quintet keep their spirits alive by bickering and waiting for grandchildren to visit at Christmas. But the festive season does not herald goodwill to all at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage. Disaster and chaos, it seems, are just around the corner ... Told with Amis's piercing wit and humanity, Ending Up (1974) is a wickedly funny black comedy of the indignities of old age. With a new introduction by Helen Dunmore.
Download or read book Lucky Him written by Richard Bradford and published by Peter Owen Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kingsley Amis always claimed that his fiction was not based on his life, and he worked hard and quite successfully at obscuring the autobiographical threads that run through his novels. But they exist, and Richard Bradford traces the channels between Amis's experiences, his states of mind, and his fictionalized versions of both. Bradford's biography shows that it is impossible to offer a comprehensive picture of Amis the man as husband, philanderer, friend, father, jester, son, boozer, agnostic, pseudo-socialist, and club-land Tory without also considering how each dimension of his life tested and extended his literary skills. Sometimes he remodeled the present, particularly during the 1950s when his books reflected his double life as family man and prolific libertine. He revisited the past in novels such as The Riverside Villas Murder, a detective story that tells us much about his early relationship with his father. Less frequently he took revenge, notably with his cruel parody of his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in Stanley and the Women. Readers of Amis's books often feel as if they have had a personal encounter with a shadowy presence behind the words, and Bradford's biography embodies this shadow.
Download or read book The Alteration written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick) In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
Download or read book The Biographer s Moustache written by Kingsley Amis and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2008-06 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gordon Scott-Thompson, a struggling hack, gets commissioned to write the biography of veteran novelist, Jimmie Fane. It is a task which proves to be fraught with extraordinary and unforeseen difficulties. Fane, an unashamed snob, has many pet hates, including younger men with moustaches and trendy pronuncation. Scott-Thompson, however, is extrememly attached to his own moustache and not so particular about his use of language. It doesn't help matters that Fane's wife Joanna isn't yet sure what she feels about coustaches, but has decided views on younger men.
Download or read book Lucky Jim written by James Hart and published by Cleis Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucky Jim is the memoir of writer Jim Hart, the story of how he survived a violent childhood home, created a love that was both so right and so wrong, overcame obsessive dependencies, and finally found the strength to be his true self. Jim is a master at building relationships. Charming, funny, and a great listener, his success in life and business was based on his ability to connect with others, from people recovering in 12-step groups in Upstate New York to those living in the rarified air of Martha’s Vineyard. But after more than twenty years sober, one slip-up triggered an active addiction that threatened his relationships with his then-wife, singer-songwriter Carly Simon, his recovery friends, his severely disabled son, and even with himself as he began to confront his sexuality. With profound clarity and thoughtful language, Jim weaves together the beautiful and all-too-often heartbreaking events of his life into an inspiring tale of bravery, healing, and above all, love.
