Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998) was Amis’s second short story collection after Einstein’s Monsters (1987). Along with his eighth novel, The Information (1995), it was the book for which Amis, thanks to his new agent Andrew (‘the Jackal’) Wiley, had secured an advance reputed to be around half-a-million pounds. It is almost twice as long as Einstein’s Monsters – in the original hardback editions, the books ran to 231 and 127 pages respectively – and contains nine stories, compared to the earlier volume’s five stories and an introductory essay. The title Heavy Water might suggest that the volume shares with Einstein’s Monsters a concern with nuclear weapons (heavy water, or d…
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Heavy Water". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 October 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10621, accessed 26 November 2024.]
