Hanif Kureishi is celebrated for his incisive explorations of identity, sexuality, and cultural clashes, often focusing on the lives of young people navigating the spaces between British and Asian cultures. His prose is marked by a raw honesty and sharp social critique that dissects the complexities of modern life. Kureishi masterfully intertwines personal experience with broader societal themes, creating works that are both provocative and deeply human. His writing reflects his unique perspective as the son of a Pakistani father and an English mother, growing up in London.
Hanif Kureishi was voted the Most Promising Playwright of the Year in 1981 by the London Theatre Critics for his plays "Borderline" and "Outskirts". This selection of plays shows his development as a writer from his own perspective and from the perspective of the British theatre of the 1970s.
'Kureishi's screenplay is one of his most focused and engaging since My Beautiful Laundrette.' Allan Hunter, Screen International At sixty-five years of age, May fears that life has passed her by - that she has become just another invisible old lady whose days are more or less numbered. When she and her husband travel down from the north to visit their grown-up children in west London, she finds them characteristically inattentive. But then her husband's unexpected death pulls the ground from under her, and she subsequently embarks on a passionate affair with Darren, a man half her age, who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter, Paula. In the midst of this tumultuous situation, May begins to understand that it can take a lifetime to feel truly alive.
This acclaimed collection charts the course of Pop from its underground origins through its low and high art phases to its current omnipresence; it takes in fiction, reportage, fashion, art and fantasy as filtered through pop music and includes work by Michael Bracewell, Angela Carter, Nick Cohn, Bob Dylan, Simon Garfield, Nelson George, Germaine Greer, Peter Guralnick, John Lennon, Norman Mailer, Greil Marcus, Iggy Pop, Neil Tennant, Lou Reed, Simon Reynolds, Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe and Malcolm X, amongst others. Covering more than 50 years of writing from 1942 on, The Faber Book of Pop is the most stimulating collection of writing on popular music ever published.
The essential collection from one of Britain's most celebrated and controversial writers.
A new paperback edition of Hanif Kureishi's wide-ranging and thought-provoking essays.
The winner of the Whitbread Best First Novel 1990, this is the story of Karim Amir, "an Englishman born and bred - almost", who lives with his English mother and Indian father in the South London suburbs. It is written by the author of "My Beautiful Launderette" and "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid".
Intimacy - now a film - analyzes the agonies and joys of being connected to another person. Jay, who is leaving his partner and their two sons, reflects on the vicissitudes of his relationship with Susan. This volume includes two short stories from Love in a Blue Time and Midnight All Day.
The centrepiece of Hanif Kureishi's brilliant new collection of fiction delves into the fascinating concept of personal identity, and the extent to which this is rooted in our physical being. Middle-aged playwright Adam is amazed to be approached by a shadowy organisation and offered the chance to trade in his decrepit body for a much younger model. He takes up the offer for a six-month period, and his consciousness is duly transplanted into the handsome body of his choice. But Adam soon finds that his new flesh brings with it grave and unforeseen dangers . . .
'Hanif Kureishi's literary memoir explores his relationship with his father, a failed writer. Kurieshi is, of course, hugely successful...' Esquire'This is an ambitious book. Kureshi - free-associating with what feels like unmitigated honesty - successfully conveys the impression that in this book he has actually given us himself.' Sunday Times'Deeply involving, highly intelligent and, in what it doesn't say rather than what it does, profoundly sad.' Evening Standard'I don't think he has done anything as good, in any medium, as this moving and fiercely honest book.' Guardian
Hanif Kureishi's fourth novel made many reviewers uneasy on its first appearance in the U.K., because it cuts so painfully near to the bone. If a novelist's first duty is to tell the truth, then the author has done his duty with unflinching courage. Intimacy gives us the thoughts and memories of a middle-aged writer on the night before he walks out on his wife and two young sons for of a younger woman. A very modern man, without political convictions or religious beliefs, he vaguely hopes to find fulfillment in sexual love. No one is spared Kureishi's cold, penetrating gaze or lacerating pen. "She thinks she's feminist, but she's just bad-tempered," the unnamed narrator says of his abandoned wife. A male friend advises him, "Marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell, and a reason for living." At the heart of Intimacy is this terrible paradox: "You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them." Male readers will wince with recognition at the narrator's hatred of entrapment and domesticity, and his implacable urge towards freedom, escape, even loneliness. Female readers may find it a truly horrific revelation. Kureishi is only telling it like it is, in staccato sentences of pinpoint accuracy. By far the author's best yet: a brilliant, devastating work. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk
