CL HEAVY WATER/ AMIS

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 strange news about life in the solar system. In ''Let Me Count the Times'' a man has a mad affair with himself. ''Heavy Water'', portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, and ''State of England'' its weird resuscitation. And in ''The Coincidence of the Arts'' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler.