• Complain

Hamid - Discontent and its Civilizations

Here you can read online Hamid - Discontent and its Civilizations full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Pakistan, year: 2015;2014, publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Hamid Discontent and its Civilizations
  • Book:
    Discontent and its Civilizations
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Penguin Publishing Group
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2015;2014
  • City:
    Pakistan
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Discontent and its Civilizations: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Discontent and its Civilizations" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From one of his generations most inventive and gifted writers (The New York Times), intimate and sharply observed commentary on life, art, politics, and the war on terror. Mohsin Hamids 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.--Publisher.

Hamid: author's other books


Who wrote Discontent and its Civilizations? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Discontent and its Civilizations — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Discontent and its Civilizations" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Discontent and its Civilizations - image 1

A LSO BY M OHSIN H AMID

Moth Smoke

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Discontent and its Civilizations - image 2

Discontent and its Civilizations - image 3

R IVERHEAD B OOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Discontent and its Civilizations - image 4

USA Canada UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

Copyright 2015 by Mohsin Hamid

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

The Riots in Lahore: Dont Angry Me originally published by newyorker.com at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/09/the-riots-in-lahore-dont-angry-me.html. Cond Nast.

After Sixty Years, Will Pakistan Be Reborn? abridged from original appearing in The New York Times, August 15, 2007, 2007 by The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamid, Mohsin, date.

Discontent and its civilizations : dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London /

Mohsin Hamid.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-18503-6

I. Title.

PS3558.A42169A6 2015 2014027668

814'.6dc23

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

Version_1

F OR D INA AND V ALI

Contents

INTRODUCTION:

My Foreign Correspondence

O NE DAY, beside a slender stream in the high mountains, a monk met an essayist and they fell to talking. The minutes passed as they reclined there in the presence of dragonflies. It soon seemed clear to the essayist that the monks view of life, perched as it was upon a foundation of faith, was ripe for a good debunking.

The essayist laid out the required argument in painstaking detail, ending with these words: Since you have no proof, I must conclude your beliefs are merely your own invention.

So what? the monk responded, with a smile as steady as it was serene.

So what? So everything. Youre a monk!

The monk hiked up the robe he was wearing and dipped the back of one powerfully muscled calf in the water. I invented myself, the monk said. Until yesterday I was an Olympic sprinter.

The essayist stared, incredulous.

Invention, the monk explained, is a blessing.

G LOBALIZATION IS A brutal phenomenon. It brings us mass displacement, wars, terrorism, unchecked financial capitalism, inequality, xenophobia, climate change. But if globalization is capable of holding out any fundamental promise to us, any temptation to go along with its havoc, then surely that promise ought to be this: we will be more free to invent ourselves. In that country, this city, in Lahore, in New York, in London, that factory, this office, in those clothes, that occupation, in wherever it is we long for, we will be liberated to be what we choose to be.

When I sat down to shape this book, a collection of pieces I wrote for various publications in the fifteen years between 2000, the time my first novel, Moth Smoke, appeared, and now, which is to say 2014, I found I was content to let much of what I had written go. Many of my past pieces were, to my present eye, simply too crudely built or too blatantly wrongheaded to include. Others were too similar to each other, meaning it was better not to pick two when one would do.

What was left, the three dozen or so pieces making up the pages that follow, I wanted to alter as little as possible, so that they would read much as they read when they were first written. I have made some minor changes, probably the most significant of which are deletions of passages that seemed too repetitive, but I have done my best to avoid any major rewriting. Each of the pieces remains of its place and of its time.

Rereading them now, I am struck by how their writer, which is to say me, has changed over the years. Obviously, there have been changes in writing style and technique. But there have been other changes as well, changes in how I view the world, changes that perhaps reflect how I am in the world, and those changes remind me that I am becoming a different person, that I am inventing myself as I go along, as I suspect we all are. The novelist I am now would not today write the novels I wrote before; the human I am now might not behave as did the human I was before.

In that sense, the fragmentary and of the moment nature of the pieces that constitute this book brings with it, I hope, a different type of honesty than a book that is conceived as a whole and executed in a single effort. It reveals opinions and attitudes that are malleable, showing the plasticity of what in any given present moment one typically presents as a rock of certainty.

But it reveals consistencies, too, themes that reappear, again and again, in pieces written at different times, for different publications, in different places. Over the past fifteen years I have lived in three cities: Lahore, New York, and London. I have called and considered all three home. And yet, as I review the writings in this book, I recognize that I have always felt myself a half-outsider. The pieces here take different forms: some are lengthy essays, others are focused op-eds, others still are small fragments just a page or two long. But all of them, I think, are the dispatches of a correspondent who cannot help but be foreign, at least in part.

P AKISTAN EMERGES as a recurrent subject of mine. I have lived more of my life in Pakistan than in any other country, even if that total still comes to a little less than half. I am preoccupied with Pakistans future, as most Pakistanis I know seem to be, Pakistan being simultaneously an unusually troubled country and one that manages to provide many of its daughters and sons with remarkably resilient roots, roots that often endure even when the plant they belong to is removed to soil a vast ocean away.

In my writings about Pakistan over the years, I perceive an attempt at optimism, probably a little forced, and possibly somewhat misguided. I have often noted the potential for changes for the better that, in retrospect, have not occurred. And yet I think a stance of optimism is not useless. With optimism comes agency, the notion that Pakistan can solve its own problems. And a lack of agency has been at the heart of Pakistans failures, an impulse to blame foreign powers who, while very far from guiltless in the Pakistani context, have only secondarily contributed to Pakistans ongoing crises, which remain primarily of Pakistani making. My position has been that foreign powers should resist the impulse to intervene in Pakistan, and that Pakistanis should correct failed Pakistani policies and attitudes themselves rather than claim these are the best that can be hoped for given the machinations of the outside world.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Discontent and its Civilizations»

Look at similar books to Discontent and its Civilizations. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Discontent and its Civilizations»

Discussion, reviews of the book Discontent and its Civilizations and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.