Salman Rushdie Popular Books
Salman Rushdie Biography & Facts
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (; born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize. After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York. In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in April 2023. He has married five times, four of which have ended in divorce. Early life and education Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June 1947 during the British Raj, into an Indian Kashmiri Muslim family. He is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a Cambridge-educated lawyer-turned-businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher. Rushdie's father was dismissed from the Indian Civil Services (ICS) after it emerged that the birth certificate submitted by him had changes to make him appear younger than he was. Rushdie has three sisters. He wrote in Joseph Anton that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes (Ibn Rushd). He recalls his "first literary influence": "When I first saw the The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me." He recalls "Every child in India in my day (and probably still) was obsessed with P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I read mountains of books by both." He recalls that "Alice captured my imagination as few other books did: both the books, not just Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but Through the Looking-Glass as well, and I can still recite the whole of "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from memory. I also loved the Swallows And Amazons series by Arthur Ransome because of the unimaginable freedom those young people sailing in the Lake District were given by their families...When I was 16, I read The Lord Of The Rings and became obsessed, and can still recite the inscription on the Ruling Ring ('One ring to rule them all...') in the dark language of Mordor. I read an astonishing amount of Golden Age science fiction, not just Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut but more arcane writers like Clifford D Simak, James Blish, Zenna Henderson and L Sprague de Camp." Rushdie grew up in Bombay and was educated at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort in South Bombay, before moving to England in 1964 to attend Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire. He then attended King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. Career Copywriter Rushdie worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker (until 1982), for whom he wrote the line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. Collaborating with musician Ronnie Bond, Rushdie wrote the words for an advertising record on behalf of the now defunct Burnley Building Society that was recorded at Good Earth Studios, London. The song was called "The Best Dreams" and was sung by George Chandler. It was while at Ogilvy that Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's, calling her "the first great writer I ever met." Literary works Early works and literary breakthrough, 1975–1987 Rushdie's debut, the science fiction tale Grimus (1975), was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children (1981), put him on the map. It follows the life of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the the birth of the modern nation of India. Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, Rushdie refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating, "People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I've never felt that I've written an autobiographical character." Rushdie writes of his "debt to the oral narrative traditions of India and also to those great Indian novelists Jane Austen and Charles Dickens—Austen for her portraits of brilliant women caged by the social convention of their time, women whose Indian counterparts I knew well; Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city, and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyperrealistic background." V. S. Pritchett wrote: "In Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight’s Children, India has produced a glittering novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. Like García Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, he weaves a whole people’s capacity for carrying its inherited myths—and new ones that it goes on generating—into a kind of magic carpet. The human swarm swarms in every man and woman as they make their bid for life and vanish into the passion or hallucination that hangs about them like the smell of India itself. Yet at the same time there are strange Western echoes, of the irony of Sterne in Tristram Shandy—that early nonlinear writer—in Rushdie’s readiness to tease by breaking off or digressing at the gravest moments. This is very odd in an Indian novel! The book is really about the mystery of being born and the puzzle of who one is." Midnight's Children won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, the Best of the Bookers and Booker of Bookers. Aft.... Discover the Salman Rushdie popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Salman Rushdie books.
Best Seller Salman Rushdie Books of 2024
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The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “[A] torrent of endlessly inventive prose, by turns comic and enraged, embracing life in all its contradictions. In this spectacular novel, ...
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Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff
Sean Penn“An incredibly interesting work.” Jane Smiley “A straight up masterwork.” Sarah Silverman “Blisteringly funny.” Corey Seymour “A transcendent apocalyptic satire.” Michael Silverbla...
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Luka and the Fire of Life
Salman Rushdie“You’ve reached the age at which people in this family cross the border into the magical world. It’s your turn for an adventureyes, it’s finally here!” So says Haroun to his y...
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Properties of Thirst
Marianne WigginsA National Bestseller A New Yorker Best Book of 2022Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggi...
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The Jaguar Smile
Salman Rushdie“I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice.” So notes ...
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Languages of Truth
Salman RushdieNewly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction from the first two decades of the twentyfirst centuryincluding many texts never previously in printby the Booker Prize–winning, in...
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Salman Rushdie
Robert Eaglestone & Martin McQuillanSir Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most significant living novelist in English. His second novel, Midnight's Children, is regularly cited as the 'Booker of Bookers' and ...
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The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
Malcolm BradburyThis anthology is in many was a ‘best of the best’, containing gems from thirtyfour of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to c...
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Shalimar the Clown
Salman Rushdie“Dazzling . . . Modern thriller, Ramayan epic, courtroom drama, slapstick comedy, wartime adventure, political satire, village legendthey’re all blended here magnificently.”The Wa...
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Russian Thinkers
Isaiah Berlin & Henry HardyFew, if any, Englishlanguage critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that R...
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The Birds and Other Plays
Aristophanes, David Barrett & Alan H. SommersteinThe plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In THE BIRDS, two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian c...
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Passages
Barbara H. Solomon & Eileen Panetta24 stories from today's best indian authorsIndia's literary tradition has found a growing audience around the world. Many talented writers have arrived on the scene, each illuminat...
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Infidel
Ayaan Hirsi AliOne of today’s most admired and controversial political figures, Ayaan Hirsi Ali burst into international headlines following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamist who threate...
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Sanshiro
Natsume Sōseki & Jay RubinOne of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23yearold Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly m...
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The Penguin Book of Migration Literature
Dohra Ahmad[Ahmad's] "introduction is fiery and charismatic... This book encompasses the diversity of experience, with beautiful variations and stories that bicker back and forth." Parul Sehg...
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The Portable Atheist
Christopher HitchensChristopher Hitchens's personally curated New York Times bestselling anthology of the most influential and important writings on atheism, including original pieces by Salman Rushdi...
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The Persians and Other Plays
Aeschylus & Alan H. SommersteinAeschylus (525456 BC) brought a new grandeur and epic sweep to the drama of classical Athens, raising it to the status of high art. The Persians, the only Greek tragedy to deal wit...
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The Oresteian Trilogy
Aeschylus & Philip VellacottAeschylus (525c.456 bc) set his great trilogy in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Troy, when King Agamemnon returns to Argos, a victor in war. Agamemnon depicts the hero's di...
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Circus of Dreams
John WalshSomething extraordinary happened to the UK literary scene in the 1980s. In the space of eight years, a generation of young British writers took the literary novel into new realms o...
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The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheYou only find true love once.When Werther dances with the beautiful Lotte, it seems as though he is in paradise. It is a joy, however, that can only ever be shortlived. Engaged to ...
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Electra and Other Plays
Sophocles & David RaeburnSophocles’ innovative plays transformed Greek myths into dramas featuring complex human characters, through which he explored profound moral issues. Electra portrays the grief of a...
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
Colm TóibínFrom Colm Tóibín, the formidable awardwinning author of The Master and Brooklyn, an illuminating, intimate study of Irish culture, history, and literature told through the lives an...
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Salman Rushdie
Stephen MortonThis introduction places the fiction of Salman Rushdie in a clear historical and theoretical context. Morton explores Rushdie's biography, the histories that inform his major w...
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Burn This Book
Toni MorrisonPublished in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the meaning of censorship and the power of literature to infor...
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Grimus
Salman Rushdie“A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and presentday . . . Thunderous and touching.”–Financial TimesAfter drinking an elixir that bestows immortali...
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Fight of the Century
Michael Chabon & Ayelet WaldmanThe American Civil Liberties Union partners with awardwinning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that b...
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Untouchable
Mulk Raj AnandMulk Raj Anand's extraordinarily powerful story of an Untouchable in India's caste system, with a new introduction by Ramachandra Guha, author of GandhiBakha is a proud and attract...
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The Comedies
TerenceThe Roman dramatist Terence (c. 186159 BC) adapted many of his comedies from Greek sources, rendering them suitable for audiences of his own time by introducing subtler characteriz...
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Victory City
Salman RushdieNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuriesfrom the transcendent imagina...
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Joseph Anton
Salman RushdieGerman Booksellers' Peace Prize 2023 La autobiografía del autor de Los versos satánicos desde el día en el que fue condenado a muerte por Jomeini por su publicación y tuvo que pasa...
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Shame
Salman RushdieThe novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is “not quite Pakistan.” In this d...
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The Enchantress of Florence
Salman RushdieA tall, yellowhaired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, wi...
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Maps
Nuruddin FarahWinner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Nuruddin Farah is one of Africa's most respected contemporary writers. Maps is the first novel in his acclaimed Blood in ...
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Quichotte
Salman RushdieNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, “a brilliant, funny, worldencompassing wonder” (Time) from internationally bestselling author Salman Ru...
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Eat Your Mind
Jason McBride“It’s shocking to learn that this is McBride’s first book...Eat Your Mind does everything a good biography should and more” Los Angeles TimesThe first fullscale authorized biograph...
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The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry
Gerald Moore'Poetry, always foremost of the arts in traditional Africa, has continued to compete for primacy against the newer forms of prose fiction and theatre drama.' This wonderfully compr...
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Fury
Salman Rushdie"Life is fury. Furysexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguisethe t...
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East, West
Salman RushdieFrom the Booker Prizewinning, bestselling author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies be...
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Orestes and Other Plays
EuripidesWritten during the long battles with Sparta that were to ultimately destroy ancient Athens, these six plays by Euripides brilliantly utilize traditional legends to illustrate the f...
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Salman Rushdie
D. C. R. A. GoonetillekeThis updated and expanded new edition reviews Rushdie's novels in the light of recent critical developments. It also features new chapters which examine the author's latest...
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Hijos de la medianoche
Salman RushdieGerman Booksellers' Peace Prize 2023 El mejor premio Booker de toda la historia. Una asombrosa novela que combina magistralmente magia y humor, compromiso político, fantasía y huma...
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Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Noakes & Margaret ReynoldsIn Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Salman Rushdie. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an indepth interview w...
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China Room
Sunjeev SahotaLONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION'S CARNEGIE MEDALNAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY NPR, TIME, AND THE STARTRIBUNE“Sunjeev Sahota's new...