This book focuses on the science fictional dimensions of Rushdie's later novels, Fury, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown and Luka and the Fire of Life, and Rushdie's first unpublished novel, The Antagonist, to show how the author's oeuvre moves towards a more consistent engagement with science fiction as a generic form and an ideological investment. The author demonstrates how Rushdie recreates personal and national histories in a science fictional setting and mode, and contends that the failure of his first novel Grimus may have led Rushdie away from SF for some time, although he returns to it with a much firmer conviction and a much stronger voice in his later novels, showing his commitment to this imaginative form which he describes in Fury as providing "the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and metaphysics."The science fictional mode is the most appropriate vehicle for expressing these thematic and ideological concerns and the organizing feature of Rushdie's oeuvre. The author rereads the later novels in light of recent critical engagement with SF as a vehicle for reimagining national histories and as a potentially subversive tool for social and political engagement in a fictional realm.

After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing–and ultimately the burden–of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island’s peak, from which the mysterious and corrosive Grimus Effect emits. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face-to-face with the island’s creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity. Salman Rushdie’s celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than thirty years ago.

"This work focuses on the science fictional dimensions of Rushdie's later novels, Fury, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown and Luka and the Fire of Life, and Rushdie's first unpublished novel, The Antagonist, to show how the author's oeuvre moves towards a more consistent engagement with science fiction as a generic form and an ideological investment"--

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Harper’s Bazaar • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • The Kansas City Star • National Post • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling. In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining. Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world. Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse. Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption. Praise for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights “Rushdie is our Scheherazade. . . . This book is a fantasy, a fairytale—and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian “One of the major literary voices of our time . . . In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that [Rushdie’s] years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death.”—USA Today “A swirling tale of genies and geniuses [that] translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.”—The Washington Post “Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his voice.”—The Boston Globe

Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible doll maker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age. Outside his window, a long humid summer, the first hot season of the third millennium, baked and perspired. The city boiled with money. Rents and property values had never been higher, and in the garment industry it was widely held that fashion had never been so fashionable. - from Fury From one of the world’s truly great writers comes a wickedly brilliant and pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since the Bombay of Midnight’s Children have a time and place been so intensely captured in a novel. Salman Rushdie’s eighth novel opens on a New York living at break-neck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives in this town of IPOs and white-hot trends looking, perversely, for escape. He is a man in flight from himself. This former philosophy professor is the inventor of a hugely popular doll whose multiform ubiquity – as puppet, cartoon and talk-show host – now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating, and Solanka very nearly commits an unforgivable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees across the Atlantic. He discovers a city roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective and a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats and bone-deep resentments. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. He becomes deeply embroiled in not one but two new liaisons, both, in very different ways, dangerous. Professor Solanka’s navigation of his new world makes for a hugely entertaining and compulsively readable novel. Fury is a pitiless comedy that lays bare, with spectacular insight and much glee, the darkest side of human nature.

How does one read a foundational postcolonial writer in English with declared Indian subcontinent roots? This book looks at ways of reading, and uncovering and recovering meanings, in postcolonial writing in English through the works of Salman Rushdie. It uses textual criticism and applied literary theory to resurrect the underlying literary architecture of one of the world’s most controversial, celebrated and enigmatic authors. It sheds light upon key aspects of Rushdie’s craft and the literary influences that contribute to his celebrated hybridity. It analyses how Rushdie uses his exceptional mastery of European, Anglo-American, Indian, Arabic and Persian literary and cultural forms to cultivate a fresh register of English that expands Western literary traditions. It also investigates an archival modernism that characterizes the writings of Rushdie. Drawing on the hitherto unexplored Rushdie Emory Archive, this book will be essential reading for students of literature, especially South Asian writing, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, linguistics and history.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, “a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder” (Time) from internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • “Lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming . . . a remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium—a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language.”—Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND NPR Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction. Praise for Quichotte “Brilliant . . . a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.”—Financial Times “Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism. . . . The narration is fleet of foot, always one step ahead of the reader—somewhere between a pinball machine and a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders. . . . This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot.”—The Sunday Times “Quichotte [is] an updating of Cervantes’s story that proves to be an equally complicated literary encounter, jumbling together a chivalric quest, a satire on Trump’s America and a whole lot of postmodern playfulness in a novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys. . . . This is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.”—The Times (UK)

Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints, a novelist of extraordinary imaginative range and power, and an erudite, and often fearless, commentator upon the state of global politics today. In this comprehensive and lucid critical study, Andrew Teverson examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie’s fiction springs in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure. Teverson also offers detailed critical readings of all Rushdie’s novels, from Grimus through to Shalimar the Clown. This definitive guide will be of interest to those working in the fields of contemporary world writing in English, postcolonial studies, twentieth and twenty-first century British literatures, and studies in the novel.

Shalimar the Clown is a masterpiece from one of our greatest writers, a dazzling novel that brings together the fiercest passions of the heart and the gravest conflicts of our time into an astonishingly powerful, all-encompassing story. Max Ophuls’ memorable life ends violently in Los Angeles in 1993 when he is murdered by his Muslim driver Noman Sher Noman, also known as Shalimar the Clown. At first the crime seems to be politically motivated—Ophuls was previously ambassador to India, and later US counterterrorism chief—but it is much more. Ophuls is a giant, an architect of the modern world: a Resistance hero and best-selling author, brilliant economist and clandestine US intelligence official. But it is as Ambassador to India that the seeds of his demise are planted, thanks to another of his great roles—irresistible lover. Visiting the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, Ophuls lures an impossibly beautiful dancer, the ambitious (and willing) Boonyi Kaul, away from her husband, and installs her as his mistress in Delhi. But their affair cannot be kept secret, and when Boonyi returns home, disgraced and obese, it seems that all she has waiting for her is the inevitable revenge of her husband: Noman Sher Noman, Shalimar the Clown. He was an acrobat and tightrope walker in their village’s traditional theatrical troupe; but soon Shalimar is trained as a militant in Kashmir’s increasingly brutal insurrection, and eventually becomes a terrorist with a global remit and a deeply personal mission of vengeance. In this stunningly rich book everything is connected, and everyone is a part of everyone else. A powerful love story, intensely political and historically informed, Shalimar the Clown is also profoundly human, an involving story of people’s lives, desires and crises, as well as—in typical Rushdie fashion—a magical tale where the dead speak and the future can be foreseen.