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

Cool, Gritty, Post-colonial literature, Quirky, Urban

Bessie Smith, the 6-foot, 200-pound Empress of the Blues, commanded stage and street with a fierce violence and a resonant, endless well of a voice. Born in Chattanooga, Tennesee, in 1894, Smith began her career singing on street corners. Under the mentorship of "Ma" Rainey, one of the most popular p

Ecstatic, Gritty, In-your-face, Violent

"If you'll gather 'round me, children, a story I will tell." So began many a Woody Guthrie ballad, invoking the huddle around the campfire, the community of the road, the generation that rode the rails during the Depression. Guthrie's songs gave a voice to that uprooted generation and to the struggle

Gritty, Pioneering, Political, Spiritual

With titles like "Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail," "Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," and "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," Charles Bukowski's work is still the stuff that teenage poet-boys read on the bus. Bukowski is a movement-less poet: not a Beat or a Confes

Beat poetry, Beats, Gritty, In-your-face, Masculine, Minimal, Smoky, Wise assy