Book description
This collection begins in the early 1980s with The Rainbow Sign,
which was written as the Introduction to the screenplay of My
Beautiful Laundrette. It allowed Kureishi to expand upon the issues
raised by the film : race, class, sexuality - issues that were
provoked by his childhood and family situation. In the ensuing
decades, he has developed these initial ideas, especially as the issue
of Islam's relation to the West has become one of the burning issues
of the time. Kureishi shows how flexible a form the essay can be - as
intellectual as Sontag or Adam Phillips, as informal and casual as Max
Beerbohm, as cool and minimalist as Joan Didion, or as provocative as
Norman Mailer. As with his fictional work, these essays display
Kureishi's ability to capture the temper of the times.
Hanif Kureishi was born and brought up in Kent. In 1984 he wrote
My Beautiful Laundrette, which received an Oscar nomination for Best
Screenplay. The Buddha of Suburbia won the Whitbread Prize for Best
First Novel in 1990 and was made into a four-part drama series by the
BBC in 1993. Intimacy, his third novel, was published in 1998, and a
film of the same title, based on the novel and other stories by the
author, was released in 2001 and won the Golden Bear award at the
Berlin Film Festival. His novel Something to Tell You was published in
2008. In July 2009 his adaptation of his novel, The Black Album,
opened at the National Theatre, prior to a nation-wide tour. In 2010
his Collected Stories were published. He has been awarded the
Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
