The War Against Cliché
Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000
by Martin Amis · first published 1998
5mentions
2recommended by
5HN commenters
2011–2024first – last mentioned
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I have enjoyed Martin Amis's work, for instance "The War Against Cliché" is a compilation of his essays.
on “Ask HN: Can you introduce me to contemporary state of essay art?” ↗Has anybody read Martin Amis’s: The War Against Cliche? It’s been several years but the book is great and the title summarizes the work of a literary critic, at their best, in my opinion.
on “What we lose when literary criticism ends” ↗The deeper I get into writing, and what it means to write well, the harder it is. Reading Martin Amis's The War Against Cliche was a particularly pernicious moment for me. So was Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. I think the question is this: does a rhetorical figure of speech help the reader or writer see the things…
on “The Quiet Ones” ↗I love that Orwell collection. An entire collection of Martin Amis essays and book reviews is called 'The War Against Cliché'[1] (your #1 above) because he too prioritizes resisting the all-too-easy tendency to rely on tired worn-out phrases. I have noticed that tabloid papers lean on this style of language more than traditional broadsheets - for me it is this (deliberate) literary lazy folksines
on “Why Clarence Thomas Uses Simple Words in His Opinions” ↗Thank you for connecting 2 sayings of Murakami Haruki :) 1.痛みは避けがたいが、苦しみはオプショナル (https://archive.ph/Ca9rE) Now, I don’t know how representative this book is of Murakami’s novelistic style, but I wonder: Is this low-maintenance, attention-deficit prose part of Murakami’s attraction, especially among the young? Do people enjoy reading him for the same reason they persist in listening to music as
on “Python’s Preprocessor” ↗