Heavy Water 

Martin Amis

Twice Signed.  1999 2nd Edition. 

Nine dazzling stories from the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of Night Train, London Fields, and Money, Heavy Water and Other Stories is a literal landscape of Martin Amis's unique and alluring fiction. 

Once you enter Amis's disorienting and hilarious world, you'll never be the same.  Every poem will remind you of "Career Move," a story in which poets are flown first-class to Hollywood in order to take meetings with sandal-shod producers, to review sales in the millions, while screenwriters struggle in near-oblivion  for publication in obscure, unread journals.  Never again will you consider communication with extraterrestrial life-forms without conjuring apocalyptic images of evil from "The Janitor on Mars."  Witness the world of "Straight Fiction," where everyone is gay except the beleaguered straight community, and our country's "don't ask, don't tell" policy evokes images of Amis's inverted, and outrageous, vision. 

From "Denton's Death," first published in 1975, to "What Happened to Me on My Holiday," published in 1997, Heavy Water and Other Stories is the most engaging and complete overview of Martin Amis's short fiction available today.