Hanif Kureishi is not only a leading contemporary novelist but also a prominent playwright, essayist, and screenwriter. He has also directed his own screenplay for the movie London Kills Me (1991). His script for the director Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1986) was nominated for an Academy Award; one of his early plays, Outskirts (1981), won the George Devine Award. His The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) received the Whitbread Prize for best first novel, and the reviewer for the Independent on Sunday called it "one of the sharpest satires on race relations in this country that I've ever read." Kureishi celebrates the counterculture and is largely anti-Establishment in his views; when he said on a Radio 4 program that he thought the anti-poll-tax riots in London were a good thing, the BBC switchboards were jammed with complaints. Reviewing his second novel, The Black Album (1995), the London magazine Time Out said that "Kureishi is...