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…
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salman rushdie
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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.
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…