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“... is so much harder than it seems,’ the narrator of Lurid & Cute says. It’s a difficulty that Adam Thirlwell’s fiction up to this point has neatly illustrated. Reluctant to surrender his authority as a critic, he interrupts each of his three previous novels with an almost identical off-stage persona, the writer as tour guide, who with perky erudition ...”

“... British reviewers. ‘Superhero fantasy is unsuitable as a theme for serious literary fiction,’ Adam Mars-Jones wrote in the Observer, ‘for much the same reason that Pot Noodles are out of place at dinner parties.’ In The Fortress of Solitude, the comic-book fantasy paradoxically shores up the novel’s naturalistic storyline. Shortly after he ...”

“... Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is culturally organised and politically structured. In Germany, where no ...”

“... less melodramatic, less obsessed with symptomatology, a discourse of quarantine rather than fever. Adam Mars-Jones’s stories, which have been appearing since the mid-Eighties, are quite unlike Guibert’s autonecrophobia. And they also eschew almost all reference to public events, concentrating rather on the phenomenology of bereavement, the ...”

“... what there might be to apologise for. In Venus Envy, the most riveting critique of Amis’s style, Adam Mars-Jones mentions the pertinent fact that in his Introduction to Einstein’s Monsters Amis ‘makes no reference ... to the most single-minded demonstration of nuclear protest, the Peace Camp at Greenham Common, or the larger movement of which it is ...”

“... known to be potentially lethal; hence all those deaths. In his Introduction to Monopolies of Loss, Adam Mars-Jones argues against the automatic linking of Aids and homosexuality, ‘as if epidemic and orientation were synonymous’, and wonders whether ‘the truly responsible thing to do now would be to write sexy nostalgic fiction set in the period ...”

“... terrain, in the Guardian, as ‘a Persian miniature under some terrible curse’; and provoked Adam Mars-Jones, in the opening sentence of his admiring review in the Observer, to tackle this question: ‘There isn’t enough beauty in the world, but isn’t it true that a work of art can be too beautiful?’ It’s also what causes the New York Times ...”

“... and with less of a turn for psychological realism and moral exactitude than the English novelist Adam Mars-Jones. And yet this very taste for the grotesque, this compulsion to offend, finally affords Guibert the necessary rhetorical panache to convey the full, exhilarating horror of his ...”

“... was not over. It would never be over. But it was over.’ ‘I have​ to admit,’ Adam Mars-Jones wrote in 1992, that when I read an optimistic newspaper item about treatment, vaccine or cure, I feel almost threatened. Part of it is simply the sense of having been fooled before. There is also a particular pang involved, the sense that ...”