Einstein’s Monsters

A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.

“Amis’s introduction to these five stories is a beautifully judged piece of polemic; a carefully reasoned emotionally charged attack on the unthinkable folly of nuclear war – an elegant, funny, moving book”—Daily Telegraph

“A phenomenal writer. He has style as quick and efficient as a flick-knife, and a gift for the grotesque that makes other people’s nightmares look like Victorian watercolours”—Sunday Times

An ex-circus strongman, veteran of Warsaw, 1939, and Notting Hill rough-justice artist, meets his own personal holocaust and ‘Einsteinian’ destiny; maximum boredom and minimum love-making are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a ‘father of the nuclear age’; evolution takes a rebarbative turn in a Kafkaesque love story; and the history of the earth is frankly discussed by one who has witnessed it all.

The stories in this collection form a unity and reveal a deep preoccupation: ‘”Einstein’s Monsters” refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves,’ writes Amis in his enlightening introductory essay, ‘We are Einstein’s monsters: not fully human, not for now.’

“Amis is first-rate; arguing inventing, demonstrating, parodying, being funny and shocking in the same breath”—Observer