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.
What if you were middle-aged and were offered the chance to trade in your sagging flesh for a much younger and more pleasing model? This is the situation in which the main character of The Body finds himself. Taking the plunge, he embarks on an odyssey of hedonism, but soon finds himself regretting what he has left behind as the responsibilities he thought he had sloughed off now begin to come home to him. Sinister forces are pursuing him, wanting possession of his 'body', and he finds himself in a no-man's-land, uncertain which way to turn. Praise for Hanif Kureishi's previous collection, Midnight All Day:
A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer, and the moving discovery of family secrets. When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father's his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley - his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition. This is a book about his father's failed career as a writer and the beginnings of Kureishi's successful career as one - as his father looks on with pride and perhaps envy.
'It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.'Jay is leaving his partner and their two sons. As the long night before his departure unfolds he remembers the ups and downs of his relationship with Susan. In an unforgettable, and often pitiless, reflection of their time together he analyses the agonies and the joys of trying to make a life with another person.
