Like Elvis selling his sweat, Salman Rushdie has sold his papers to Emory. Who knew all that cruft you save in random files on your laptop could be foisted off for a million bucks?

Salman Rushdie has sold his personal papers to Emory University in Atlanta… Mr. Rushdie, 59, will also join the faculty in 2007 for five years as a distinguished writer in residence… the collection contained original manuscripts of all of Mr. Rushdie’s books, including two early, unpublished novels, as well as journals that he said Mr. Rushdie kept “compulsively” for 36 years. The journals he has written since 1989 — when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa authorizing his murder because of the irreverent portrayal of Muhammad in his book “The Satanic Verses” — will remain closed “for a period…” Rushdie plans to use the material to write an autobiography. [Link]

I thought I’d already read Rushdie’s autobiography. It’s called Fury According to this deal, all has to do is show up and teach for one month a year between ‘07 and ‘11. Like Bubba Clinton, isn’t he a bit young to be bidding for legacy?

… some scholars speculated Friday the papers were worth well in excess of $1 million… The Emory deal is Rushdie’s first extended relationship with a university… Rushdie will come to campus next spring and will lead a graduate seminar, participate in undergraduate classes, advise students, engage in symposia and deliver a public lecture, the university said. He will teach for at least four weeks during each of the next five years… [Link]

It all goes down in that world center of South Asian lit. I’m speaking of Georgia:

Rushdie’s appointment and the addition of his works are a huge coup for Emory… The university began collecting the literary works of modern authors in earnest in the late 1970s. Among its most important acquisitions are archives of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes in 1997 and a major portion of the archives of the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney in 2003…

The Rushdie acquisition is likely to upset scholars in Britain, who have argued for years that the British government isn’t doing enough to keep the works of that nation’s most respected scholars on their side of the ocean… authors don’t face the same kind of tax issues in the United States as they do in Britian, and American institutions find donors to help acquire archives. “Historically there has been much more commitment to collecting living authors” in the United States… [Link]

Not mentioned in the press: for the payout to happen, Padma Lakshmi has to show up in class like the hottest postcolonial lit TA you never had.