Showing results by author "Hari Kunzru" in All Categories

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent COVID case.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely known as the greatest Russian writers of science fiction, and their 1964 novel Hard to Be a God is considered one of the greatest of their works. It tells the story of Don Rumata, who is sent from Earth to the medieval kingdom of Arkanar with instructions to observe and to influence, but never to directly interfere.

After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives - a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life - and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.

Two 20-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw.

The California desert. A four-year-old boy disappears, plunging his parents into the public hell of a media witch-hunt. But the desert is inexplicable and miraculous, and the family's fate is bound up with that of all those who have travelled before them through this brutally powerful landscape. Multilayered and a compulsively readable, Gods Without Men is a heartfelt exploration of our search for pattern and meaning in a random and chaotic universe.

Transmission, Hari Kunzru's new novel of love and lunacy, immigration and immunity, introduces a daydreaming Indian computer geek whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.

One for the Trouble: Book Slam, Volume One is the first release from the UK’s premier literary event. Eighteen Book Slam alumni, from household names like Irvine Welsh and William Boyd to newcomers like Kate Tempest and Sophie Woolley, were approached to take a song title for inspiration for a new short story or poem. Some took this literally (Jon McGregor’s moving reimagining of A House’s 'Endless Art', for example); others suggestively....

Opposites and borders are never as clear as we think. With a novelist's eye for the unexpected, author Hari Kunzru takes listeners into the gray zone between life and death, public and private, black and white, and more. Along the way he meets philosophers and punk musicians, New Age gurus and space explorers, and together they investigate liminal spaces around the world. Into the Zone: Audio Essays includes a new foreword and afterword providing bookends to a series of brilliantly crafted intersections on history and the evolution of identity.

It's the day before Mike Frame's 50th birthday and his quiet provincial life is suddenly falling apart. But perhaps it doesn't matter, because it's not his life in the first place. He has a past that his partner Miranda and step-daughter Sam know nothing about, lived under another name amidst the turbulence of the revolutionary armed struggle of the 1970s. Now Mike is seeing ghosts: a dead ex-lover and an old friend who wants to reminisce.

Transmission, Hari Kunzru's new novel of love and lunacy, immigration and immunity, introduces a daydreaming Indian computer geek whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.

A writer has left his family in Brooklyn for a three-month residency in Berlin, hoping for undisturbed days devoted to artistic absorption. When nothing goes according to plan, he finds himself holed up in his room watching Blue Lives, a violent cop show with a bleak and merciless worldview. One night at a party he meets Anton, the charismatic creator of the show, and strikes up a conversation. It is a conversation that leads him on a journey into the heart of moral darkness. A conversation that threatens to destroy everything he holds most dear, including his own mind.

It's the 1990's, and Jay is an artist tipped for greatness. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, a promising career is already taking shape before him. Despite the brutal end of his intense relationship with Alice, his great love, he's destined to make his mark on the world as one of the most brilliant young creatives of the last century. Everyone is going to remember his name. It's 2020, and Jay lives out of his car, working as a delivery driver in wealthy upstate New York. Jay arrives at an enormous mansion and collapses from exhaustion --- right at the feet of Alice.

Two 20-something New Yorkers: awkward Seth and Carter, the trust fund hipster. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Rising stars on the producing scene, they stumble across a blues song long forgotten by history - and everything starts to unravel as they are drawn down a path that allows no return. Trapped in a game they don't understand, caught between performer and audience, righteous and forsaken....

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.

It’s the day before Mike Frame’s 50th birthday, and his quiet, provincial life is suddenly falling apart. But perhaps it doesn’t matter because it’s not his life in the first place. He has a past that his partner, Miranda, and stepdaughter, Sam, know nothing about. Now Mike is seeing ghosts - a dead ex-lover, and an old friend who wants to reminisce. Mike can no longer ignore the contradiction between who he is and who he once was.