The+Pregnant+Widow+by+Martin+Amis

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=Book Summary= It was the summer of 1970,” the start of a new era of sexual freedom and female ascendancy. Keith, an English college student, is staying in a castle in Italy with friends. His unnervingly frank girlfriend glumly wishes she were beautiful, like the bodacious Scheherazade, who, in spite of her promising name, is dull as dust yet causes near-riots in town and pitches Keith into confusion. His hapless attempts to secretly court Scheherazade propel Amis’ sly variation on classic love stories. This farcical tale of a summer of lust, in which the women have all the power but don’t know what to do with it, is interwoven with glimpses of Keith in his fifties, a thrice-married, acerbic literary critic appalled by the grim alchemy of age and the crassness of the digital era. As young Keith reads British fiction, from Clarissa to Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights, Amis also borrows coyly from classic mythology, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Shakespeare, and D. H. Lawrence. Amid droll banter and hilariously raunchy episodes, immensely gifted and piquantly mercurial Amis ponders, in passages of surpassing eloquence, beauty, time, self, deception, “the winepress of death,” and the abiding light of literature, deepening the valence of this charmingly provocative and philosophical comedy of desire. //--Donna Seaman//

=About the Author=

Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, including //Money//(1984) and //London Fields// (1989). He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. //The Times// named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what //The New York Times// called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. //The Guardian// writes that "[a]ll his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop." - Wikipedia