Vintage Books

In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janitor of Mars', a sardonic robot gives us some...

In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescaline, sat down and waited to see what would happen. Huxley described his experience in 'The Doors of Perception' and its sequel 'Heaven and Hell'. This joint volume has a foreword by J.G. Ballard....

A compulsively readable account of a journey to the Congo - a country virtually inaccessible to the outside world - vividly told by a daring and adventurous journalist. Ever since Stanley first charted its mighty river in the 1870s, the Congo has epitomized the dark and turbulent history of a failed continent. However, its troubles only served to...

"The Chalk Circle Man" is the very welcome first novel of Vargas' Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg series, the eccentric French series featuring an eccentric French policeman who investigates by intuition and instinct, and arrests people against logic. And always gets his man.Mysterious chalk circles have started to appear on the streets of Paris. Drawn...

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveler calling himself 'Mogor dell 'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather...

Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist while still in college, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, then seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, even as your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze and drugs. Imagine being given a second chance, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable...