Everyone who has had a brush with academic life and/or is an alcoholic, will relish every page of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.
Take, for instance, his description of the main character’s hangover:
“[Jim] Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way… He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning… His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad”
Return of the Kingsley | The American Conservative
Prayers have been answered: Kingsley Amis’s novels Lucky Jim and The Old Devils are being reissued in the United States. The New York Review of Books Press has printed the new editions…