The year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though dedicated to the cause they have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory--or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow. Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long, hot summer in a castle in Italy. The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith's subsequent love life for decades. Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change.

«Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for «The Guardian beginning», ‘It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment’. And he has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, 'In the Palce of the End' and 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'. All are collected here, together with an expanded account of his travels with Tony Blair in 2007 — to Belfast, to Washington, and to Baghdad and Basra. 'We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism', he writes: 'the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq ... Meanwhile, September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism'.»

Blitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the bacchanalia bent bon-vivants ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend are reeling in an hallucinatory haze of sex and seduction. But as Friday melts into Saturday and Saturday spirals into Sunday and sobriety sets in, the orgiastic romp descends to disastrous depths.

This is the story of John Self, consumer extraordinaire. Rolling around New York and London, he makes deals, spends wildly and does reckless movie-world business, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, this is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money, the terrible things it can do and the disasters it can precipitate.

«Equally at home in satirical novels and biting critical essays, wickedly funny short stories and intimate autobiography, Martin Amis is widely regarded as one of the most influential yet inimitable voices in contemporary fiction, a writer whose prose captures the warp-speed rush of modernity. «Vintage Amis» displays this versatility in an excerpt from the author’s award-winning memoir, «Experience»; the “Horrorday” chapter from «London Fields»; a vignette from his novel «Money»; the stories “State of England”, “Insight at Flam Lake” and “Coincidence of the Arts”; and the essays “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov”, “Phantom of the Opera”. Also included, for the first time in book form, the short story “Porno’s Last Summer”.»