Discontent and its Civilizations, Mohsin Hamid
Discontent and its Civilizations, Mohsin Hamid
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Discontent and its Civilizations
Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

Author: Mohsin Hamid

Narrator: Mohsin Hamid

Unabridged: 4 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 02/24/2015


Synopsis

From “one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers” (The New York Times), intimate and sharply observed commentary on life, art, politics, and “the war on terror.”
 
Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international bestseller, they have earned him a reputation as a “master critic of the modern global condition” (Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family, identity. Here he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political, and are shot through with the same passion, imagination, and breathtaking shifts of perspective that gives his fiction its unmistakable electric charge.
 
A “water lily” who has called three countries on three continents his home—Pakistan, the birthplace to which he returned as a young father; the United States, where he spent his childhood and young adulthood; and Britain, where he married and became a citizen—Hamid writes about overlapping worlds with fluidity and penetrating insight. Whether he is discussing courtship rituals or pop culture, drones or the rhythms of daily life in an extended family compound, he transports us beyond the scarifying headlines of an anxious West and a volatile East, beyond stereotype and assumption, and helps to bring a dazzling diverse global culture within emotional and intellectual reach.

About The Author

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the international bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize. His first novel, Moth Smoke, won the Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. His essays, a number of them collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Trish

This slim book of essays by Mohsin Hamid is one of the most interesting and important books per square inch of space that I have read in a very long time. I have had difficulty reading lately, with lots of distractions and changes in my own life. Hamid’s small book of nonfiction essays promised to b......more

Goodreads review by Faizan

Absolutely fantastic read. Although a very brief book, likely to be finished by most readers in a day or two, it is profound in the diverse topics that it covers and has personally left me with a lot to think about. It is a collection of articles written by Mohsin Hamid for various publications over......more

Goodreads review by Zak

A heartfelt series of essays which have appeared before in various publications. These articles span more than a decade and encompass the years he studied and worked in New York, London and Lahore. I have read all of Hamid's fictional works before, 'Moth Smoke' and 'How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising......more


Quotes

Praise for Discontent and its Civilizations

"Smart doesn’t begin to describe Hamid; he is the sort of thinker that could change hearts and minds."—Booklist

“Honest and candid…Passion and hope infuse Hamid's most incisive dispatches.”—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
 
“A showcase for its author’s audacious talents…both an affecting and highly specific tale of love and ambition, and a larger metaphorical look at the startling social and economic changes that are…changing the lives of millions.”
—Michiko Kakutani, “10 Favorite Books of 2013,” The New York Times
 
“Extraordinarily clever.” —The Washington Post
 
“Marvelous and moving.” —Time