The interview provoked immediate controversy, much of it played out in the pages of The Guardian newspaper. The attention he receives, and the passions his fiercely vivid novels, stories and essays provoke, remains far beyond any of his contemporaries or those of younger authors, none of whom has yet managed to unseat him as the current father of English letters. Notable Works: “Dead Babies” “Einstein’s Monsters” “Experience” “House of Meetings” “Inside Story” “Koba the Dread” “London Fields” “Money” “Night Train” “Other People” “Success” “The Information” “The Pregnant Widow” “The Rachel Papers” “The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump.

The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim (1954) sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, where his father lectured.Essay, an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Amis's 2014 novel The Zone of Interest concerns the Holocaust, his second work of fiction to tackle the subject after Time's Arrow. His works—including the novels Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow (1991), and Night Train (1998)—feature inventive wordplay and often scabrous humour as they satirize the horrors of modern life.

The New York Times wrote after his death: "To come of reading age in the last three decades of the 20th century – from the oil embargo through the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the way to 9/11 – was to live, it now seems clear, in the Amis Era. When dream husband Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury, and personality change. Amis is also the author of several collections of essays, including The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), and The War Against Cliché (2001), which includes essays and book reviews.Perhaps the most entertaining story is The Janitor on Mars in which Amis lets scientific jargon flow and shows up inferior humanity. Following the harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to the beach resort of José Ignacio, Uruguay, with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

Straight Fiction" ( Esquire, 1995) in which everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered though increasingly vocal 'straight' community. Short story, brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters. Keith's sister, Violet, is based on Amis's own sister, Sally, described by Amis as one of the revolution's most spectacular victims. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad … like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating" ( The Guardian, August 2003). In a review of Saul Bellow’s work, Amis remarks admiringly that, "To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work".One of the books that Amis reviewed for The Observer in 1972 was Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, the title story of which features an over-populated Earth with ubiquitous government-run "Ethical Suicide Parlors". This dazzling, troubling work is a rhetorical and technical tour de force, but its very success in this regard – in its voicing of the unspeakable – opens the novel to accusations of opportunism and impropriety. Two early stories from the 70's ( Denton's Death and the updated title story) baffled us completely. In January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year.

And then there is the laic philosopher, who observes human life from the highest altitudes, held aloft by vast infusions of erudition and experience. Told from the perspectives of two Nazis and a Jew, the novel examines the horrors of Auschwitz by chronicling the quotidian romantic entanglements of the former two alongside the grim duties imposed on the latter. At their best, those famous sentences continue to be some of the most powerful in British fiction, and though it now seems more often to be for the wrong reasons, the publication of an Amis novel remains an event in contemporary writing.

James Wood, for instance, argues that Amis’s "word-coining power" and "verbal and formal ambition" have been crucial forces for the revitalisation of the novel in English since the 1970s.