Susie Thomas – författare

Hanif Kureishi is one of the most exciting and controversial British writers who has produced significant work in a range of forms: plays, essays, novels, short stories and film. This guide introduces and sets in context the key debates about his work, and discusses his writing in relation to such issues as gender, postcolonial theory and British identity today. By exploring Kureishi's own statements and a wide range of critical perspectives, the guide provides a comprehensive resource for the study of one of the most important critical figures in contemporary culture.

A spirited, clear-eyed account of the life and work of the author of the cult novel, Beer in the Snooker ClubWaguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club is hailed as one of the “best novels ever written about Egypt” (Ahdaf Soueif) and a “classic” of postcolonial literature (Pankaj Mishra). It skewers both the treachery of the British in Suez and Nasser’s police state with unprecedented comic brio.Ghali’s family were Coptic Orthodox Christians who belonged to Egypt’s cosmopolitan elite. After his father’s early death Ghali became the poor relation, passed between relatives, without a home of his own. As a medical student in Cairo, he rioted against the British in 1948 and was packed off to Paris by his family; soon after he returned to Egypt, he was forced to flee again because he feared arrest by the new regime. In 1953, aged twenty-one, he sailed from Port Said to Tilbury Docks and spent the rest of his life in exile. Tragically, he killed himself in 1968, in the apartment of his friend and editor, Diana Athill, leaving behind six volumes of diaries.In lively, engaging prose, Susie Thomas sets out to chart the terrain of Ghali’s life and work, drawing on his diaries, journalism, correspondence, and anecdotes from surviving friends, while Zainab Magdy explores how the translation of Beer in the Snooker Club into Arabic led to the return of the prodigal son in his own land. Citizen of Nowhere vividly illuminates Ghali’s importance as a crucial representative of postcolonial literature and examines the psychic cost exacted by statelessness on his life with humor and compassion.

Willa Cather's novels were neglected after her death, but a new generation of readers has greeted her work with enthusiasm. This feminist study, which draws extensively on Cather's unpublished letters, analyses how she overcame the difficulties which beset a woman writer in the mid-West during the early Chapter of the century. It shows how her absorption in European culture influenced her perception of America and enabled her to produce some of the most compelling literature of modern times. Susie Thomas's highly readable account will be welcomed by all those studying Cather's work. Contents: Willa Cather 1873-1947; To Bayreuth and Back Again:^R The Troll Garden, The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, Uncle Valentine; From Horse Opera to Homesteads: O Pioneers!; The Golden Girl of the West: My Antonia; Time's Fool and A Lost Lady; To Speak of the Woe That is in Marriage: The Professor's House; The Chemistry of Colour: Death Comes For the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock; Testimony: Obscure Destinies, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Old Beauty and Others