Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The author's father, Kingsley Amis, was 'a Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and later in life his closest friend, was Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror was second only to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.

'Indignant, angry, personal and strangely touching - Koba the Dread carries a punch, artfully delivered' New York Times

About the Author
Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century - in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience - he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

Reviews
A powerfully written, well-documented polemic reminding us of how 20 million humans were starved, murdered or totured to death by Uncle Joe * Daily Mail *
More than any of his contemporaries, Amis writes things that you want to remember and repeat: he is original * New Statesman *
Amis uses all the tricks of his well-mastered trade to make readable what is almost unreadable, indeed hardly bearable... A disturbing book...but a book I was very glad to have read * Financial Times *
Martin Amis' book will not date...it is wise, witty and saturated with saeva indignatio, the only adequate response to tyranny * Literary Review *
What's best about him is his style. He is never dull -- John Carey * Sunday Times *



Book Information
ISBN 9780099438021
Author Martin Amis
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 246g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 21mm