Hari Kunzru

 Back in the 90’s, when modems were slow and day-glo orange was an acceptable eveningwear color, I used to work for Wired magazine.

 It is seven years since Alan Hollinghurst won the 2004 Booker prize for The Line of Beauty, his Jamesian account of an eighties arriviste moving in high Tory circles. That novel confirmed his reputation as an acute chronicler of gay experience and its subterranean relationship to English networks of social and political power.

 I am floating in a world made entirely of text. Lines of white courier type stretch away to the horizon, spelling out passages from Borges’s Library of Babel: The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries… I look down and experience a sudden twinge of vertigo.