Nearly half the writers on the Booker Prize longlist this year have desi connections.
Adiga
Newcomers Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) and Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and veteran novelists Joseph O’Neill (cricket novel Netherland), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies + more) and Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence) all made this year’s […]
There are certain friends-with-benefits to playing the celebrity author game. Salman Rushdie cashed in with a cameo in a video for Scarlett Johansson’s vanity album. The track is ‘Falling Down,’ a Tom Waits cover. It’s probably safe to call it a step up from playing Helen Hunt’s ob/gyn. He shows up at 3:05:
Here’s lookin’ at you, kids.
For the second time, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie has been judged the best ever winner of the Booker prize. The Best of Booker award, which has been announced at the London literature festival this afternoon, marks the prize’s 40th anniversary. [Link]
… more than 10,000 votes had been cast, mostly from […]
When I was first gifted a beautiful, metallic cherry-red, video-capable iPod, I copied only two clips over. One was an early, unfinished scene from Sita Sings the Blues. The other was Salman Rushdie bemoaning the state of literary criticism on the Colbert Report.
On this press swing, Rushdie seemed bemused and short-circuited by Colbert’s suddenly more […]
Salman Rushdie has at least two sides: the funny, witty raconteur who had the audience eating out of his hand while introducing Midnight’s Children in Harlem, and the geeky dungeonmaster who wants you to care about his elaborate terraforming. (Three, if you count vexed by protesters or critics and made profane by the interruption.)
For the […]
Salman Rushdie began his Enchantress PR blitz yesterday with a stop on The View and an interview on WNYC, the Noo Yawk NPR affiliate:
The View stop was surreal. Rushdie’s nasal-congestion voice turned bemused among questions focusing on his sex life, and a set of spoon-fed talking points that were the very embodiment of corporate media.
A certain author soft-launched his book into stores a week ago, just like with that tale of Kashmir and a clown. (Finding a new Rushdie unannounced is like discovering garlic naan in your freezer.) And The Enchantress of Florence is good so far. It reminds me of The Moor’s Last Sigh, though he’s lost some […]
Why NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani can’t abide Salman Rushdie:
Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize [her own] prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and […]
It all began, as it often does with a Bengali that isn’t from the Boston area, with fish and flights of fancy. It was two years after a book had been excitedly smuggled into our house and read at top speed by my dad because it had to be returned to its rightful owner within […]
Sometimes a book reviewer so hates an author’s style, the review itself becomes an example of tawdry lit. The excess and purplocity with which they fling literary feces have the hi-lo appeal of Simon Cowell berating Hermione Granger in a library. Check out these angry yet entertaining reviews of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and Salman […]
Dear Abhi and Amit,
The bad news is I’ve been cheating on you with another prominent desi blogger. Try and be strong for your readers.
The good news is you both dumped me over my (superior, of course) literary tastes on the same day, you shallow buggers:
She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved […]
The mullahs issued their fatwa against Salman Rushdie 19 years ago today, a date he memorialized in The Ground Beneath Her Feet in a scene just as bloody as the inception of the holiday. It’s hard not to read the scene as a metaphor for both the jihadis and the unwanted press:
On St. Valentine’s Day, […]
The Great Horned One leaks his release date for The Enchantress of Florence: April in the UK, June 3rd in Amrika, August for maple-leaved Kannada.
… The Enchantress Of Florence… begins on a farm outside Florence where the ageing Niccolo Machiavelli receives the personal emissary of the first Mughal emperor of India. [Link]
A tall, yellow-haired […]
Here’s Salman Rushdie on Benazir Bhutto in Shame, his satire on Pakistani politics:
Arjumand Harappa qualified in the law, became active in the green revolution, threw zamindars out of their palaces, opened dungeons, led raids on the homes of film stars and slit open their mattresses with a long two-edged knife, laughed as the black money […]