With Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis established himself as the bad boy of twentieth-century British letters. Later he became famous as another kind of bad boy, an inveterate boozer, a red-faced scourge of political correctness. He was consistent throughout in being a committed enemy of any form of “right thinking,” which helped to make him one of the most consistently unconventional and exploratory writers of his day, a master of classical English prose who was unafraid to apply himself to literary genres all too often dismissed as “low.” Science fiction, the spy story, the ghost story were all grist for Amis’s mill, and nowhere is the experimental spirit in which he worked, his will to test both reality and the reader’s imagination, more apparent than in his short stories. These “woodchips from [his] workshop”—as he called them—are anything but throwaway work. They are instead the essence of Amis, a brew that is as tonic as it is intoxicating.

'I suppose it was conceited of me. But it was fun. And I felt like getting a bit of my own back on some of the people who'd conned and flattered me into wasting all those years.' In this wry, piercing short story from one of the greatest of all British postwar writers, an ageing poet considers the value of his art � and of the critics who�ve found genius in it. Then, with his final work, he exercises a unique revenge . . .

This work is a result of the fourth symposium in the University of Ottawa Symposia series following those on Canadian writers Grove (1973), Klein (1974), and Lampman (1975). Scholars, friends, and readers gathered on May 1-2, 1976, to discuss "Ned Pratt", otherwise known as E.J. Pratt (1883-1964), the man and the poet. The two day event featured a biographical panel led by Fred Cogswell and various papers intended to establish the literary identity of the distinguished Canadian author. Other contributors include Glenn Clever, Elizabeth Brewster, Ralph Gustafson, Carl F. Klinck, Germaine Warkentin, Peter Stevens, Peter Buitenhuis, Sandra Djwa, Peter Hunt, Agnes Nyland, Robert Gibbs, Louis K. MacKendrick, and Lila Laakso.