The Moronic Inferno

Martin Amis, the renowned author of Money and London Fields, presents a collection of essays on the “moronic inferno,” aka the United States of America. A thrilling tour of late-twentieth-century America through the eyes of one of Britain’s most canny and caustic cultural critics. In The Moronic Inferno, Martin Amis turns his razor-sharp intellect across the Atlantic, ensnaring the United States in a trap of its own contradictions. From the gaudy sanctimony of televangelists to the myth-making machinery of Hollywood, the literary titans of postwar fiction to the grinning facade of Reagan-era politics, Amis dissects American life with an outsider’s clarity and a satirist’s glee. Collected from his essays and reportage throughout the 1980s, these pieces showcase Amis at his most observant, irreverent, and unnervingly on point. Reading them now, one can’t help but wonder: what would he make of our own moment—of influencers, strongmen, mass delusion, and digital spectacle? The Moronic Inferno is not just a portrait of a country—it’s a dispatch from the front lines of a cultural condition that has only grown more surreal.