Graffiti it is a rapidly developing art form whose value is highly contested and reviled by many authorities while also subject to protection, sometimes within the same jurisdiction. Both "graffiti" and its occasional singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word "graffiato" ("scratched"). "Graffiti" is applied in art history to works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into it. In ancient times
In the Light of What We Know when the true pleasure of a work of fiction is its gravitational pull upon us?” In a 4,000-word review for "The New Yorker", the critic James Wood described Rahman as “a deep and subtle storyteller,” and praised the novel as “astonishingly achieved…Isn’t this kind of thinking—worldly and personal, abstract and concrete, essayistic and dramatic—exactly what the novel is for? How it justifies itself as a form?…"In the Light of What We Know" is what Salman Rushdie once called an ‘everything novel.’ It is wide-armed, hospitable, disputatious, worldly, cerebral. Ideas and provocations abound on every page.” Australian literary critic Louise Adler