My Beautiful Laundrette

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571319351
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Book Description
Omar is a restless young Asian man, caring for his alcoholic father in the hustling London of the mid-1980s. His uncle, a keen Thatcherite, offers Omar an entrepreneurial opportunity to revamp a dingy laundrette, and ambitious Omar rolls up his sleeves, enlisting the assistance of his old school-friend Johnny, who has since fallen in with a gang of neo-fascists. Omar and Johnny soon form an unlikely alliance that leads to business success, as well as other, more intimate surprises.

My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571177387
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
Hanif Kureishi's groundbreaking 1984 screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette immediately received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. In addition to his screenplays and fiction Kureishi is also the author of several popular essays which are collected here, together with My Beautiful Laundrette, in a single volume for the first time. This remarkable collection shows the emergence of a major writer who is equally at home in the diverse worlds of film, fiction and non-fiction. It proves without doubt that Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain's most enduring literary talents.

Love in a Blue Time

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068484818X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
This provocative collection of short stories charts the growth of a generation from the liberating irreverence of the late 1970s to the dilemmas of responsibility and fidelity of the 1990s. The stories resonate with Hanif Kureishi's dead-on observations of human passion and folly, his brilliant depiction of seedy locales and magical characters, and his original, wicked sense of humor.

The Nothing

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 057133203X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 139

Book Description
One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the noises growing louder. I am sure they are making love in Zenab's bedroom which is next to mine.Waldo, a fêted filmmaker, is confined by old age and ill health to his London apartment. Frail and frustrated, he is cared for by his lovely younger wife, Zee. But when he suspects that Zee is beginning an affair with Eddie, 'more than an acquaintance and less than a friend for over thirty years,' Waldo is pressed to action: determined to expose the couple, he sets himself first to prove his suspicions correct - and then to enact his revenge.Written with characteristic black humour and with an acute eye for detail, Kureishi's eagerly awaited novella will have his readers dazzled once again by a brilliant mind at work.

Hanif Kureishi

Author: Kenneth C. Kaleta
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029277978X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
"Hanif Kureishi is a proper Englishman. Almost." So observes biographer Kenneth Kaleta. Well known for his films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the Anglo-Asian screenwriter, essayist, and novelist has become one of the leading portrayers of Britain's multicultural society. His work raises important questions of personal and national identity as it probes the experience of growing up in one culture with roots in another, very different one. This book is the first critical biography of Hanif Kureishi. Kenneth Kaleta interviewed Kureishi over several years and enjoyed unlimited access to all of his working papers, journals, and personal files. From this rich cache of material, he opens a fascinating window onto Kureishi's creative process, tracing such works as My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Buddha of Suburbia, London Kills Me, The Black Album, and Love in a Blue Time from their genesis to their public reception. Writing for Kureishi fans as well as film and cultural studies scholars, Kaleta pieces together a vivid mosaic of the postcolonial, hybrid British culture that has nourished Kureishi and his work.

Film analysis of 'My Beautiful Laundrette' - Finding Where to Belong to

Author: Fiona Steinert
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640559630
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 16

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1,7, University of Hannover, language: English, abstract: The movie “My Beautiful Laundrette” based on the Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay and directed by Stephen Frears made its debut in the British cinemas in 1985. It touches on various aspects of conflicts that minorities face. It adheres to sexual identity, class and racial problems by presenting many sorts of emotional bonding and the struggle to find one’s right space in society. My focus will be on the narrative structure and the analysis of the characters’ behaviours and actions, therefore I did not use many secondary sources. I am going to analyse the film by looking at three leitmotifs: “love”, “success” and “cultural rules of behaviour”. These leitmotifs are interrelated and often contradictory, which leads to many conflicts. The family love and support helps Omar achieve great success in his working class situation, which is backed with equal strength by his partner Johnny. Without Johnny he would have been unable to restore the laundrette. His success can also be seen as a result of the Pakistani code of behaviour where it is normal to give a relative a job if there is a chance to do so. However, the conventional rules of behaviour on both sides, Pakistani and British, stand against the relationship between Omar and Johnny and therefore also stand in the way of their success. All the characters present part of a subculture in which they have to strive harder than a middle-class person to be accepted by society. They have to face many boundaries and social problems. “My Beautiful Laundrette” depicts these hard lives without playing on one’s heart strings. It rather illustrates how it is possible to control one’s own fate by making the most of the given situation and refraining from believing stereotypes.

Something to Tell You

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588183
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
The stunningly original, iconoclastic, award-winning author of The Buddha of Suburbia returns with an exhuberant novel about a psychoanalyst on the search for forgiveness and fulfillment. In the early 1980s Hanif Kureishi emerged as one of the most compelling new voices in film and fiction. His movies My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia captivated audiences and inspired other artists. In Something to Tell You, he travels back to those days of hedonism, activism and glorious creativity. And he explores the lives of that generation now, in a very different London. Jamal is middle-aged, though reluctant to admit it. He has an ex-wife, a son he adores, a thriving career as a psychoanalyst and vast reserves of unsatisfied desire. "Secrets are my currency," he says. "I deal in them for a living." And he has some of his own. He is haunted by Ajita, his first love, whom he hasn't seen in decades, and by an act of violence he has never confessed. With great empathy and agility, Kureishi has created an array of unforgettable characters -- a hilarious and eccentric theater director, a covey of charming and defiant outcasts and an ebullient sister who thrives on the fringe. All wrestle with their own limits as human beings; all are plagued by the past until they find it within themselves to forgive. Comic, wise and unfailingly tender, Something to Tell You is Kureishi's best work to date, brilliant and exhilarating.

My Ear at His Heart

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588191
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
Described in a recent New York Times Magazine profile as a "postcolonial Philip Roth," Hanif Kureishi first captured the attention of audiences and critics in the 1980s with the award-winning novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In three decades of acclaimed work, Kureishi has written fiction and films exploring a series of interconnected themes about identity and desire—from Islamic radicalism to kinky sex, and from psychoanalysis to the relationships of fathers and sons. After discovering an abandoned manuscript of his father’s, hidden for years, Kureishi was compelled to turn his "unflinching perspective" (Time Out) onto his own history. Like Roth, Martin Amis and Geoffrey Wolfe, who also have written books about their fathers, Kureishi wanted to understand and perhaps to reconcile. My Ear at His Heart offers remarkable insight into the birth of a writer, chronicling how Kureishi’s own literary calling emerged from the ashes of his father’s aspirations. And so begins a journey that takes Kureishi through his father’s privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, through the turbulent birth of Pakistan and to his modest adult life in England—his days spent as a civil servant, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition. "A beguiling and complex tale of fact, fiction and family tensions" (The Guardian), My Ear at His Heart was published to great acclaim in the United Kingdom in 2004 and went on to win the prestigious Prix France Culture Etranger. Now, this profound work from one of the most compelling artists of our time is at last available in a Scribner edition.

The Buddha of Suburbia

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014013168X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel "There was one copy going round our school like contraband. I read it in one sitting ... I'd never read a book about anyone remotely like me before."-- Zadie Smith "My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost..." The hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel is dreamy teenager Karim, desperate to escape suburban South London and experience the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. When the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre announces itself, Karim starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving - albeit with some rude and raucous results. With the publication of Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi landed into the literary landscape as a distinct new voice and a fearless taboo-breaking writer. The novel inspired a ground-breaking BBC series featuring a soundtrack by David Bowie.

London Kills Me

Author: Hanif Kureishi
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140168311
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
This collection includes three screenplays as well as essays about the background of each film or life on the set. In addition, Kureishi has written about the beatles-- a comic commentary on class and culture in England. [cover].