
Show Notes
Gender scholar, author and columnist Zoe Strimpel tells Jack Aldane about the "sexual sentimental education" she gleaned from Martin Amis’s novels as a young woman battling teenage angst.
In particular, they discuss Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, which introduced Zoe to the dark corners of male heterosexuality through Amis's burgeoning comic prose style, and how the book's portrayal of sex compares with the rules of attraction today.
Is the novel's insatiably horny hero Charles Highway now an extinct breed, or is his academic approach to sex a precursor to the modern male propensity to overthink?
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: @mymartinamis FIND US ON YOUTUBE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from My Martin Amis
Leon Craig's debut novel The Decadence was published in September of 2025, with the paperback due to be published in August 2026.
Many a male Amis reader owes his smoking habit to the author.
For this episode of My Martin Amis, we're plugging into the London recording studio of the New Statesman magazine.
David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his sixth novel Flesh in 2025. In this tense, spare, frictionless work of fiction, he drip feeds us the story of the laconic male protagonist Istvan, who spends his youth in a juvenile facility in Hungary before eventually finding his way into a fractured family situated among the upper echelons of London's wealthiest elites, where his fortunes soon unravel.
In the basement room of an East London flat one rainy January morning, Jack sat down with the Irish writer Rob Doyle to discuss the publication of his third novel, Cameo, and delve into his long and complex love for the work of Martin Amis.