Foreign Policy's 100 leading global thinkers in 2013 'We're born with an in-built capacity for language. It is wired into our brains, just as an in-built capacity for breathing is wired into our lungs. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self.'

Alongside his highly acclaimed novels, Mohsin Hamid has written superb pieces over the years about politics, literature and his own life. Collected together for the first time, they show that Hamid is not just a great novelist but 'a master critic of the modern global condition'. Provocative, dexterous, full of ideas - this is a sparkling collection.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, as well as the collection of essays Discontents and Its Civilizations. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books. Born and mostly raised in Pakistan, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York.