Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.
While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that M...
Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synaesthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the colour of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her...
Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad...
What I have realized, is that the generations,' Samad continued as they sped through miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, 'they speak to each other, Jones. It's not a line, Life is not a line -- t...
This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the ai...
They caught up with each other's news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome - after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in...
Prove to me that you are right. Prove to me that you are more right than God. Nothing on earth would do it. Because Ryan didn't believe in or care about anything on earth.
Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she f...
Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don’t ever underestimate people, don’t ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bo...
Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!’ No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thi...
Leah watches Natalie stride over to her beautiful kitchen with her beautiful child. Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversations that can't...
Lanier is interested in the ways in which people reduce themselves in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. Information systems, he writes, need to have information in o...
Janet Jackson kicked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna continued it, Beyoncé is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and po...
It’s the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked biracial and tick the box marked black on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a b...
It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself—and isn’t that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn’t know or appreciate this aspect of my luck u...
It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.
It was during this time that Archie learnt the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him...
It seems to me, said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. I...
It just goes to show,’ said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on th...