Hari Kunzru

Early in Bret Easton Ellis’s bleak new novel, the narrator, Clay, a well-known writer, is negotiating a sexual transaction with a starlet who hopes he’ll put her in a movie. He’s suspicious that ‘Rain’ isn’t her real name. “Does it matter?” she asks.  Well,” Clay answers.

Hari Kunzru's first novel, The Impressionist, won a Somerset Maugham award and earned him a place on Granta's list of the best British novelists under 40. His second novel, Transmission, is hugely engaging.

Judging by Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 (Barbican, now until 18th October 2009), Nature (with a capital N) is in crisis. It’s not just the familiar ecological message of the show – that the planet is fragile and we’re not helping matters – but something more unsettling, almost uncanny. It feels like Nature is shrinking.

It took 9/11 to rip the vein of romanticism for left-wing terrorism out of the American brain.