salman rushdie
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Aziz Nesin’s Ghost
This week, the Turkish government has jailed a prominent politician who is referred to fondly as “Kurdish Obama” and shutdown Cumhuriyet, a popular newspaper. Amid these distressing developments, Kaya Genç looks towards books and history in her profile of 20th century…
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Weekly Geekery
Your brain on stories. (Or, molecular effects of Star Wars.) Read books, live longer… …but only Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie will make you live better. Mapping the human condition on 10,000 New Yorkers. Startup culture meets culture culture. Afrofuturistic science…
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All That We Could Do with This Emotion
Writing for the Guardian, novelist Val McDermid disputes the recent study which suggests that “literary” fiction readers are more empathetic than “genre” readers: There is no doubt that, historically, there was a valid distinction. Nobody would attempt to suggest that there is an…
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Writing from the Margins into the Universal
Sahota takes it further in “The Year of the Runaways”: “What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare things.” With an eye on…
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Notable NYC: 12/12–12/18
Saturday 12/12: Diana Hamilton and Steve McCaffery join the Segue series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Many people read Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. Housing Works, 1 p.m., free. Brian Matthew Kim, Ann Podracky, Jolie Hale, and Jason N. Fischedick…
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The President’s Holiday Reading List
Electric Literature has the scoop on the list of books President Obama and his family bought during their recent excursion on Small Business Saturday. Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Franzen made their way onto the President’s reading list.
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The Freedom of Fiction
Literature may be weak because it has no real power in the world, but in a way it is the grandest narrative of all, in that it puts ourselves into question with fiction. We challenge ourselves and refuse to take…
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Iran Calls Rushdie Speech at Frankfurt “Anti-Cultural”
This has been organised by the Frankfurt book fair and crosses one of our political system’s red lines. We consider this move as anti-cultural,” [Seyed Abbas Salehi, deputy minister for culture and Islamic guidance] said, according to local news agencies.…
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A Q&A with Salman Rushdie
The fictions of literature declare themselves as fictions — they are lies which admit they are lies and are therefore able, at their best, to tell profound truths. The fictions of politics declare themselves as truths and are therefore, often,…
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Sacred Literature
For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter interviews Salman Rushdie about his new novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Their discussion covers the stylistic choices that went into the novel, as well as the role of mythology and polytheistic religions…
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Barker
Susan Barker discusses her third novel, The Incarnations, writing dialogue in a second language, the Opium Wars and Chinese history, and the years of research that went into her book.
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Lost in Translation, Lost in Context
PEN America generated quite a controversy when it decided to honor French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. Six authors called for a boycott of the gala and circulated a petition slamming the organization. Other authors, like Salman Rushdie, criticized the critics.…