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 | | | Portrait: Salman Rushdie, by Mokhtar Paki. |
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| 8/15/1947 |
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Nehru, Rushdie, Midnight's Children
On this day in 1947, India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain. Salman Rushdie got the title for his 1981 Booker Prize-winner, Midnight's Children from the speech Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave in the first minutes of the new day: "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. . . ." |
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| 12/11/1911 |
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Of Fame and Fatwas
On this day in 1911 the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was born. Despite a death sentence pronounced against him by Omar Abdul-Rahman, and nearly carried out in 1994, Mahfouz chronicled and questioned Egyptian society throughout his long life. He was given a state funeral when he died in 2006 - at which time Abdul-Rahman was a decade into his life sentence. |
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Conversations With Salman Rushdie
by Salman Rushdie, Juan Williams, Michael R. Reder (Editor)
interviews |
East, West: Stories
short stories |
Fury: A Novel
fiction |
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
fiction |
Midnight's Children
fiction |
Shame: A Novel
fiction |
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
non-fiction, essays |
The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel
fiction |
The Moor's Last Sigh
fiction |
The Satanic Verses
fiction |
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FIND BOOKS BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
AT
Powell's Books
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Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie
by M. Keith Booker (Editor)
essays |
Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie
by Jeremy Jennings (Editor), Anthony Kemp-Welch (Editor)
non-fiction |
Salman Rushdie
by Damian Grant
biography |
Salman Rushdie: A Beginner's Guide
by Andrew Blake, Rob Abbott (Editor), Charlie Bell (Editor)
guide, biography |
Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works
by Sabrina Hassumani
criticism and analysis |
The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West
by Daniel Pipes, Koenraad Elst
non-fiction |
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions
by Martin Amis
essays |
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FIND BOOKS BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
AT
Powell's
Books
TinL Premium Members save 10% on every order!
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BBC Interviews
An interview in which the author discusses the fading of his love affair with Bombay, the issue of place, of belonging and not belonging, The Satanic Verses, the fatwa against him, and his appreciation of the huge collective effort on his behalf.
"There are a lot of people who like The Satanic Verses. They don't scream or shout or make their threats, but it seems to me that their opinions are just as valuable as those who dote. And I just think that this is a book which for peculiar historical reasons came for a time to be defined by the people who really hated it, mostly without reading it, and I think maybe it's time to deliver it into gentler hands of people who get the point." |  | Guardian Unlimited
Offers a biographical profile (the author's influences include Jonathan Swift and James Joyce) and articles by Rushdie on Iraq, and Islam versus Islamism, and the dangers of religion. A review of Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction is also available.
"With the 1989 fatwa over Satanic Verses, Rushdie became a political figure, with all the distractions from literary assessments that that entails (that the offensive passage was an anti-realist dream sequence simply made the whole affair so much odder). Today he is mocked for his rock-star buddies and singular style, but remains one of the biggest talents in post-colonial literature." | | New York Times Books
Find several articles about the writer's life -- including the infamous "fatwa" declared against him by the Ayatolla Khomeni -- and commentary on such works as The Satanic Verses, Shame, Midnight's Children, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. An interview is also provided. | | Notes on The Satanic Verses
This useful resource for students offers a guide to the text which features a chapter-by-chapter plot summary, glossary of terms, and notes which provide context and deeper understanding into the book's references, metaphors, and extended meanings. Also includes a number of essays about the novel and related topics.
"Islam is a religious tradition which in many influential quarters is self-consciously seeking to purify itself from modernizing, liberal tendencies. Although Islamic tales both short and long abound, and there are many authors of fiction who are highly honored, the modern novel as such is not a comfortable form in the Muslim world. Often it is identified with the West, with mere entertainment, with lax morals. In addition, Muslim writers who write novels are often critical of tradition. The 1994 near-fatal assault on the Egyptian Nobel Prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz illustrates the perils that even the most acclaimed of novelists may encounter in an era of religious polarization. To be sure, most Muslims abhor such assaults; but the feelings which cause them are all too familiar in such countries as Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and even Turkey. To a conservative Muslim, Islam is not just a religion in the sense that most Westerners use the term, a private faith which provides hope and consolation within a secular world. Islam is a way of life, a body of law, an all-embracing cultural framework within which novels are distinctly unimportant and potentially troublesome. That a mere novelist should dare to satirize fundamental religious beliefs is intolerable." | | Salon
A 1996 interview in which the author discusses the "fatwa" against him, its affect on his life, and his book The Moor's Last Sigh:
"The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you. And one of the things that I thought a lot about at the time of the fatwa and ever since is that quite a few of the people I really care about died during this period, all about the same age as I am, and they were not under a death sentence. They just died, of lung cancer, AIDS, whatever. It occurred to me that you don't need a fatwa, it can happen anytime. And that's one of the reasons why I think there is such a sense of urgency in this novel. It's all about a guy whose life is speeded up, that we may not have as much time as we think." | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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