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 with introductions by Keith Gessen (n+1 editor and novelist) and John Banville (Irish novelist and critic). Eric Hanson has drawn splendid covers for both, but I especially like his Jim Dixon: head down, arms behind his back and hands reaching out from his elbow-patched tweed, his weary cigarette sending up a pathetic little smoke signal as he approaches the lecture hall’s monstrous redbrick façade. [....] Amis’s comedy in...