From Library Journal
This collection of ten short stories by the author of the highly acclaimed My Beautiful Laundrette and other screenplays shares a common theme: a non-Westerner's sense of alienation from mainstream Western society. In some, the characters are Pakistani immigrants enduring subtle or overt racism in lower-class London. Most often, however, the narrator is a moderately successful writer living in London who indulges in drugs, meaningless sex, and exploitative relationships. Kureishi seems to extend his range in one story by getting inside the character of a streetwise young woman who goes to Pakistan to visit her wealthy father, yet the narrator turns out to be that same male persona manipulating the character. Even when touched by success, the characters are morally hollow and treat each other to petty cruelties and easy betrayals. These stories are sexually explicit, sometimes scatological, cynical, and very disturbing, yet they are not without considerable insight into human nature.?Reba Leiding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, N.Y.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Entertainment Weekly
In tales that range from the tartly picaresque ("With Your Tongue Down My Throat") to the sophomoric ("In a Blue Time"), Kureishi--famous for the screenplays My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid--describes a London with "drugged, useless people who ... never spoke of anything serious."... he captures their soulless wheel spinning with comic timing and flashes of scalding black humor.

The New York Times Book Review, Laura Miller
If Kureishi's novels are coming-of-age tales, then these stories are coming-of-middle-age tales, and the passage is far less sunny.... Kureishi's love of the world has always been the heartbeat of his work, and it's most evident when he's writing about family and ethnicity. In fact, his refusal to romanticize race makes him one of those rare artists who can explore the subject without disingenuous piety.

From Kirkus Reviews
An ebulliently realistic collection from savvy British screenwriter and novelist Kureishi (The Black Album, 1995, etc.). It's refreshing to read a writer of such alert and unaffected skill. Unlike American minimalists, Kureishi looks outward and into the lives of others, coming back with fiction that is large, rugged, and true. And his canny imagination avoids sentimental missteps. In ``The Flies,'' for instance, chronicling an infestation of insects in the life of a young couple, he writes with a mordant flair for the parable and grotesque that recalls Kafka: ``At night he begins to dream of ragged bullet-shaped holes chewed in fetid fabric, and of creamy white eggs hatching in darkness. In his mind he hears the amplified rustle of gnawing, chewing, devouring.'' Kureishi is above all a social observer, offering shrewd reports on a generation of urban Brits who've survived their youth and don't know what's supposed to happen next: career, money, marriage, or the more vertiginous and splendid pleasures of liberty prolonged. Avoiding moral judgment, he can sympathize with all concerned--while sporadically tweaking them, as he does particularly well in ``The Tale of the Turd,'' in which a 44-year-old ne'er-do-well goes to dinner at the home of his 18- year-old girlfriend's all too respectable parents. Existentially uneasy, he winds up in the loo, mid-supper, with one big problem to face: ``I glance at the turd and notice little teeth in its velvet head, and a little mouth opening.'' After semi-mortal combat with this unwanted guest, he throws it out the window: ``On, on, one goes, despite everything, not knowing why or how.'' Kureishi's characters do mostly choose to go on, even when they've run out of drugs, money, lodging, and friends. The charm of their jaunty style of perseverance is not small. Some find a moment's redemption or two in Kureishi's ever more apt evocations of sex, earthily unromantic and serenely accurate. Roguish intelligence is everywhere here. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
Carey HarrisonSan Francisco ChronicleKureishi...knows both sides of the street and applies to them a cultured prose...combining the restlessness of Chekhov with the grim accuracy of apocalyptically minded American contemporaries like Robert Stone.

Review
Carey Harrison San Francisco Chronicle Kureishi...knows both sides of the street and applies to them a cultured prose...combining the restlessness of Chekhov with the grim accuracy of apocalyptically minded American contemporaries like Robert Stone.

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.

About the Author
Hanif Kureishi is the author of My Beautiful Laundrette, which received an Oscar nomination for best screenplay, as well as the screenplay Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and the novels The Black Album and Intimacy. His short stories and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Village Voice, and The Atlantic. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Story 8: "Nightlight"'There must always be two to a kiss.'R. L. Stevenson, 'An Apology for Idlers'She comes to him late on Wednesdays, only for sex, the cab waiting outside. Four months ago someone recommended her to him for a job but he has no work she can do. He doesn't even pay himself now. They talk of nothing much, and there are silences in which they can only look at one another. But neither wants to withdraw and something must be moving between them, for they stand up together and lie down beside the table, without speaking.Same time next week she is at the door. They undress immediately. She leaves, not having slept, but he has felt her dozing before she determinedly shakes herself awake. She collects herself quickly without apology, and goes without looking back. He has no idea where she lives or where she is from.Now she doesn't come into the house, but goes straight down into the basement he can't afford to furnish, where he has thrown blankets and duvets on the carpet. They neither drink nor play music and can barely see one another. It's a mime show in this room where everything but clarity, it seems, is permitted.At work his debts increase. What he has left could be taken away, and no one but him knows it. He is losing his hold and does it matter? Why should it, except that it is probably terminal; if one day he feels differently, there'll be no way back.For most of his life, particularly at school, he's been successful, or en route to somewhere called Success. Like most people he has been afraid of being found out, but unlike most he probably has been. He has a small flat, an old car and a shabby feeling. These are minor losses. He misses steady quotidian progress, the sense that his well-being, if not happiness, is increasing, and that each day leads to a recognisable future. He has never anticipated this extent of random desolation.Three days a week he picks up his kids from school, feeds them, and returns them to the house into which he put most of his money, and which his wife now forbids him to enter. Fridays he has dinner with his only male friend. After, they go to a black bar where he likes the music. The men, mostly in their thirties, and whose lives are a mystery to him, seem to sit night after night without visible discontent, looking at women and at one another. He envies this, and wonders if their lives are without anxiety, whether they have attained a stoic resignation, or if it is a profound uselessness they are stewing in.On this woman's day he bathes for an hour. He can't recall her name, and she never says his. She calls him, when necessary, 'man'. Soon she will arrive. He lies there thinking how lucky he is to have one arrangement which costs nothing.Five years ago he left the wife he didn't know why he married for another woman, who then left him without explanation. There have been others since. But when they come close he can only move backwards, without comprehending why.His wife won't speak. If she picks up the phone and hears his voice, she calls for the kids, those intermediaries growing up between immovable hatreds. A successful woman, last year she found she could not leave her bed at all. She will have no help and the children have to minister to her. They are inclined to believe that he has caused this. He begins to think he can make women insane, even as he understands that this flatters him.Now he has this inexplicable liaison. At first they run tearing at one another with middle-aged recklessness and then lie silently in the dark, until desire, all they have, rekindles. He tells himself to make the most of the opportunity.When she's gone he masturbates, contemplating what they did, imprinting it on his mind for ready reference: she on her stomach, him on the boat of her back, his face in her black hair forever. He thinks of the fluffy black hairs, flattened with sweat, like a toff's parting, around her arsehole.Walking about later he is both satisfied and unfulfilled, disliking himself for not knowing why he is doing this -- balked by the puzzle of his own mind and the impossibility of grasping why one behaves so oddly, and why one ends up resenting people for not providing what one hasn't been able to ask for. Surely this new thing is a web of illusion, and he is a fool? But he wants more foolishness, and not only on Wednesdays.The following weeks she seems to sense something. In the space where they lie beneath the level of the street, almost underground -- a mouse's view of the world -- she invites him to lie in different positions; she bids him touch different parts of her body. She shows him they can pore over one another.Something intriguing is happening in this room, week after week. He can't know what it might be. He isn't certain she will turn up; he doesn't trust her, or any woman, not to let him down. Each week she surprises him, until he wonders what might make her stop.One Wednesday the cab doesn't draw up. He stands at the window in his dressing gown and slippers for three hours, feeling in the first hour like Casanova, in the second like a child awaiting its mother, and during the third like an old man. Is she sick, or with her husband? He lies on the floor where she usually lies, in a fever of desire and longing, until, later, he feels a presence in the room, a hanging column of air, and sits up and cries out at this ghost.He assumes he is toxic. For him, lacking disadvantages has been a crime in itself. He grasps the historical reasons for this, since his wife pointed them out. Not that this prevented her living off him. For a while he did try to be the sort of man she might countenance. He wept at every opportunity, and communicated with animals wherever he found them. He tried not to raise his voice, though for her it was 'liberating' to get wild. Soon he didn't know who he was supposed to be. They both got lost. He dreaded going home. He kept his mouth shut, for fear of what would come out; this made her search angrily for a way in.Now he worries that something has happened to this new woman and he has no way of knowing. What wound or hopelessness has made her want only this?Next week she does come, standing in the doorway, coat-wrapped, smiling, in her early thirties, about fifteen years younger than him. She might have a lover or husband; might be unemployed; might be disillusioned with love, or getting married next week. But she is tender. How he has missed what they do together.The following morning he goes downstairs and smells her on the sheets. The day is suffused with her, whoever she is. He finds himself thinking constantly of her, pondering the peculiar mixture of ignorance and intimacy they have. If sex is how you meet and get to know people, what does he know of her? On her body he can paint only imaginary figures, as in the early days of love, when any dreams and desires can be flung onto the subject, until reality upsets and rearranges them. Not knowing, surely, is beautiful, as if everything one learns detracts from the pleasures of pure imagination. Fancy could provide them with more satisfaction than reality.But she is beginning to make him wonder, and when one night he touches her and feels he has never loved anything so much -- if love is loss of the self in the other then, yes, he loves her -- he begins to want confirmation of the notions which pile up day after day without making any helpful shape. And, after so many years of living, the expensive education, the languages he imagined would be useful, the books and newspapers studied, can he be capable of love only with a silent stranger in a darkened room? But he dismisses the idea of speaking, because he can't take any more disappointment. Nothing must disturb their perfect evenings.You want sex and a good time, and you get it; but it usually comes with a free gift -- someone like you, a person. Their arrangement seems an advance, what many people want, the best without the worst, and no demands -- particularly when he thinks, as he does constantly, of the spirit he and his wife wasted in dislike and sniping, and the years of taking legal and financial revenge. He thinks often of the night he left.He comes in late, having just left the bed of the woman he is seeing, who has said she is his. The solid bulk of his wife, her back turned, is unmoving. His last night. In the morning he'll talk to the kids and go, as so many men he knows have done, people who'd thought that leaving home was something you did only once. Most of his friends, most of the people he knows, are on the move from wife to wife, husband to husband, lover to lover. A city of love vampires, turning from person to person, hunting the one who will make the difference.He puts on the light in the hall, undresses and is about to lie down when he notices that she is now lying on her back and her eyes are open. Strangely she looks less pale. He realises she is wearing eyeshadow and lipstick. Now she reaches out to him, smiling. He moves away; something is wrong. She throws back the covers and she is wearing black and red underwear. She has never, he is certain, dressed like this before.'It's too late,' he wants to cry.He picks up his clothes, rushes to the door and closes it behind him. He doesn't know what he is doing, only that he has to get out. The hardest part is going into the children's room, finding their faces in the mess of blankets and toys, and kissing them goodbye.This must have turned his mind, for, convinced that people have to take something with them, he hurries into his study and attempts to pick up his computer. There are wires; he cannot disconnect it. He gathers up the television from the shelf. He's carrying this downstairs when he turns and sees his wife, still in her tart garb, with a dressing gown on top, screaming, 'Where are you going? Where? Where?'He shouts, 'You've had ten years of me, ten years and no more, no more!'He slips on the step and falls forward, doubling up over the TV and tripping down the remaining stairs. Without stopping to consider his injuries, he flees the house without affection or dislike and doesn't look back, thinking only, strange, one never knows every corner of the houses one lives in as an adult, not as one knew one's childhood house. He leaves the TV in the front garden.The woman he sees now helps kill the terrible fear he constantly bears that his romantic self has been crushed. He feels dangerous but wants to wake up in love. Soft, soft; he dreams of opening a door and the person he will love is standing behind it.This longing can seize him at parties, in restaurants, at friends' and in the street. He sits opposite a woman in the train. With her the past will be redeemed. He follows her. She crosses the street. So does he. She is going to panic. He grabs her arm and shouts, 'No, no, I'm not like that!' and runs away.He doesn't know how to reach others, but disliking them is exhausting. Now he doesn't want to go out, since who is there to hold onto? But in the house his mind devours itself; he is a cannibal of his own consciousness. He is starving for want of love. The shame of loneliness, a dingy affliction! There are few creatures more despised than middle-aged men with strong desires, and desire renews itself each day, returning like a recurring illness, crying out, more life, more!At night he sits in the attic looking through a box of old letters from women. There is an abundance of pastoral description. The women sit in cafés drinking good coffee; they eat peaches on the patio; they look at snow. Everyday sensations are raised to the sublime. He wants to be scornful. It is easy to imagine 'buzzes' and 'charges' as the sole satisfactions. But what gratifies him? It is as if the gears of his life have become disengaged from the mechanisms that drove him forward. When he looks at what other people yearn for, he can't grasp why they don't know it isn't worth wanting. He asks to be returned to the ordinary with new eyes. He wants to play a child's game: make a list of what you noticed today, adding desires, regrets and contentments, if any, to the list, so that your life doesn't pass without your having noticed it. And he requires the extraordinary, on Wednesdays.He lies on his side in her, their mouths are open, her legs holding him. When necessary they move to maintain the level of warm luxury. He can only gauge her mood by the manner of her love-making. Sometimes she merely grabs him; or she lies down, offering her neck and throat to be kissed.He opens his eyes to see her watching him. It has been a long time since anyone has looked at him with such attention. His hope is boosted by a new feeling: curiosity. He thinks of taking their sexuality into the world. He wants to watch others looking at her, to have others see them together, as confirmation. There is so much love he almost attempts conversation.For several weeks he determines to speak during their love-making, each time telling himself that on this occasion the words will come out. 'We should talk,' is the sentence he prepares, which becomes abbreviated to 'Want to talk?' and even 'Talk?'However his not speaking has clearly gladdened this woman. Who else could he cheer up in this way? Won't clarity wreck their understanding, and don't they have an alternative vocabulary of caresses? Words come out bent, but who can bend a kiss? If only he didn't have to imagine continually that he has to take some action, think that something should happen, as if friendships, like trains, have to go somewhere.He has begun to think that what goes on in this room is his only hope. Having forgotten what he likes about the world, and thinking of existence as drudgery, she reminds him, finger by finger, of the worthwhile. All his life, it seems, he's been seeking sex. He isn't certain why, but he must have gathered that it was an important thing to want. And now he has it, it doesn't seem sufficient. But what does that matter? As long as there is desire there is a pulse; you are alive; to want is to reach beyond yourself, into the world, finger by finger.Copyright © 1997 by Hanif Kureishi

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Love in a Blue Time reveals the essence of a generation—from the liberating irreverence of the seventies to the dilemmas and disillusionments of the nineties. In "With Your Tongue Down My Throat," a Pakistani girl's visit to London foments a revolution in her conservative home. In "My Son the Fanatic," a father, suspicious of his son's rejection of his once-sacred adolescent possessions, makes a discovery about the new values of the younger generation. And throughout, men and women, once carefree, careless, and usually stoned, grapple with responsibility, fidelity, and other complications of adult life in the middle-class nineties. Driven by love, but distracted by sex, drugs, and the sheer compulsion of argument, these characters are consummate voices of their time. And Kureishi, naughty, provocative, yet intensely sympathetic, finds the heart of their struggle.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles Taylor

Nobody can make you homesick for sleaze the way Hanif Kureishi can. Most of the characters in his fiction are first generation British or Asians recently transplanted to the U.K. The London they live in has almost nothing to do with tourist brochures or "Masterpiece Theatre." It's a dirty, smelly place, riven by racial tensions and the lack of money, dangerous and hard-hearted and almost impossibly vital.

Kureishi's last novel, The Black Album, was the most affectionate description of the pop kaleidoscope of London life since Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners. Would that his short stories had the same affection. Most of the tales in Love in a Blue Time seem cut from the same cloth as his screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. That is, cheaply ironic and far, far too satisfied with its own hip radicalism.

Love In a Blue Time isn't good, but you wouldn't mistake it for the work of a bad writer. Perhaps it's Kureishi's affinity for pop music that gives his work it's up-to-the-moment feel, its ability to get at the essence of an era through its fashions and attitudes that can make the work of other current British writers seem to be moldering on the shelf. Even when scoring easy points, he can sum up those who prospered in the Thatcher '80s in one paragraph: "He had lived through an age when men and women with energy and ruthlessness but without much ability or persistence excelled. And even though most of them had gone under, their ignorance had confused Roy, making him wonder whether the things he had striven to learn, and thought of as 'culture,' were irrelevant. Everything was supposed to be the same: commercials, Beethoven's late quartets, pop records, shopfronts, Freud, multi-coloured hair. Greatness, comparison, value, depth: gone, gone, gone. Anything could give some pleasure; he saw that. But not everything provided the sustenance of a deeper understanding."

Unfortunately, those last two lines pretty much sum up this collection. These short stories bring out Kureishi's worst quality, the way he sometimes settles for reducing character to a matter of a few nasty brushstrokes. Kureishi is the kind of guy who needs to commit to the all-night party to work up a real feel for the scene. He's too talented to drop in just to let go with a couple of bitchy remarks. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

The characters in this collection of 10 storieschiefly Pakistanis transplanted to Englandare for the most part bitter, vengeful, petty, unfulfilled and vicious. They're unattractive to their fellow characters and to us. But screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette) and novelist (The Buddha of Suburbia) Kureishi's unadorned prose and fast plots compel a surprising amount of empathy for these small souls, along with satisfaction that we are not they. In the collection's sharpest piece, "D'Accord, Baby," moviemaker Bill discovers that his wife has slept with a French intellectual named Vincent, so he sets out to bed Vincent's daughter in an act of revenge. But after Bill satisfies her demands for rough sex, he leaves with the bittersweet revelation "that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived." In the collection's longest, most cluttered story, "With Your Tongue Down My Throat," a young woman meets the half-sister who has garnered her father's devotion and then embarks on a wild Pakistani adventure that blows the lid off her sibling's demure facade. In these and the other stories, sordid behavior is never more than a page away, as the wry wit of Kureishi's mischievous fiction enlivens a series of airless, empty lives. (Nov.)

Library Journal

This collection of ten short stories by the author of the highly acclaimed My Beautiful Laundrette and other screenplays shares a common theme: a non-Westerner's sense of alienation from mainstream Western society. In some, the characters are Pakistani immigrants enduring subtle or overt racism in lower-class London. Most often, however, the narrator is a moderately successful writer living in London who indulges in drugs, meaningless sex, and exploitative relationships. Kureishi seems to extend his range in one story by getting inside the character of a streetwise young woman who goes to Pakistan to visit her wealthy father, yet the narrator turns out to be that same male persona manipulating the character. Even when touched by success, the characters are morally hollow and treat each other to petty cruelties and easy betrayals. These stories are sexually explicit, sometimes scatological, cynical, and very disturbing, yet they are not without considerable insight into human nature.Reba Leiding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, N.Y.

Laura Miller - The New York Times Book Review

Kureishi has "the master's touch when it comes to making us feel we've been thrust into the thick of things."

Kirkus Reviews

An ebulliently realistic collection from savvy British screenwriter and novelist Kureishi (The Black Album, 1995, etc.).

It's refreshing to read a writer of such alert and unaffected skill. Unlike American minimalists, Kureishi looks outward and into the lives of others, coming back with fiction that is large, rugged, and true. And his canny imagination avoids sentimental missteps. In "The Flies," for instance, chronicling an infestation of insects in the life of a young couple, he writes with a mordant flair for the parable and grotesque that recalls Kafka: "At night he begins to dream of ragged bullet-shaped holes chewed in fetid fabric, and of creamy white eggs hatching in darkness. In his mind he hears the amplified rustle of gnawing, chewing, devouring." Kureishi is above all a social observer, offering shrewd reports on a generation of urban Brits who've survived their youth and don't know what's supposed to happen next: career, money, marriage, or the more vertiginous and splendid pleasures of liberty prolonged. Avoiding moral judgment, he can sympathize with all concerned—while sporadically tweaking them, as he does particularly well in "The Tale of the Turd," in which a 44-year-old ne'er-do-well goes to dinner at the home of his 18- year-old girlfriend's all too respectable parents. Existentially uneasy, he winds up in the loo, mid-supper, with one big problem to face: "I glance at the turd and notice little teeth in its velvet head, and a little mouth opening." After semi-mortal combat with this unwanted guest, he throws it out the window: "On, on, one goes, despite everything, not knowing why or how." Kureishi's characters do mostly choose to go on, even when they've run out of drugs, money, lodging, and friends. The charm of their jaunty style of perseverance is not small. Some find a moment's redemption or two in Kureishi's ever more apt evocations of sex, earthily unromantic and serenely accurate.

Roguish intelligence is everywhere here.