Hanif Kureishi was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1954, the son of a "Subcontinental" father (read: Pakistani) and an English mother. Growing up in the suburbs, he watched his father's obsessive efforts to write his way out of discrimination and obscurity -- efforts that went unrecognized outside the fami
Gertrude Stein may challenge Jacqueline Susann as the biggest self-promoter of twentieth-century letters. Stein had a habit of proclaiming herself a "genius" and each of her works a "masterpiece." She was perhaps stretching it a bit, but she did become a pivotal figure in Modernism, influencing a
Kurt Vonnegut's curious blend of Science Fiction, black humor, absurdity, and relentless irony may be his way of dealing with an incomprehensible world. His hybridized fiction certainly offers an escapist alternative, one that Vonnegut has elaborated over 30 years of literary production. Faced in rea
"Curiouser and curiouser!" was Alice's verdict on her adventures down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (1865), a book that exposed the absurdity of adult conventions and manners above ground. Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson) was a pathologically shy math