Nice to get Rushdie's intensity without the filter of fiction. He's an engaging thinker and a great writer--this collection is a great place to go if you're not up to a novel at the moment, but want a little dose of Rushdie. Liked it way better than his short fiction.

I give the book only three stars since Rushdie do not open up for tha other people can have another view. A lot of interesting thoughts but too arogant. He seems to have all the answers.

Didn't read all of it. Only the essays on Kipling and Vonnegut, along with a brilliant essay about the so called "Commonwealth Literature".

https://dgvpawar.blogspot.com/2014/06...

If you ever wondered about the meaning of 'home' from an immigrant perspective, this is your book!

This book contains an interview between Salam Rushdie and Edward Said about Palestinian Identity. I'm already exited to read it :-)

A fantastic collection of essays on literature, censorship, politics in India, and much more.

Rushdie's defense of his novel "The Satanic Verses", titled "In Good Faith" is a very powerful piece of writing.

His reviews of many works of literature is endlessly fascinating.

Highly Recommended.

Among my favorite essay collections.

It's an odd book, collecting much of what Rushdie wrote that wasn't fiction and wasn't already collected somewhere. So, we get some fascinating looks at politics in India during the early 80s, which made me realize how much more I have to learn about India and Pakistan in general. We get some book reviews mostly of great authors, but mostly of books that happened to be assigned to him rather than necessarily their best works. (Though I am definitely intrigued to read Italo Calvino after Rushdie's enthusiastic look at his oeuvre to that date.) We get a little bit about cinema, and a bit about America, and several references to the famous fatwah against him. The last few chapters are concerned with Rushdie's powerful beliefs concerning secularism, and the ways in which those who absorb new ideas create new things as opposed to the ways those who are convinced they have the unchanging Truth are opposing humanity's needs. And then there's a three page unconvincing conversion to Islam at the end, which I looked up and learned was only put there as an attempt to convince people to stop wanting him dead. Other than that, Rushdie's writing is superb, and his ideas generate many new thoughts in my head. I think I just bought this book because I wanted to see what he wrote about Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, but my mind is moving in all sorts of different directions after reading it.

I've probably said it before but I'll say it again: The thing that impresses me about Rushdie most is his consistency. I don't think there's anyone whose writing has such breadth and quality: essays, criticism, children's books, reportage, autobiography and (obviously) fiction - everything he turns his hand to is good.

“The struggle of man against power, Milan Kundera has written, 'is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

ATTTTEEEEE

Every time I read one of Rushdie's book reviews, I end up with a list of new books to add to Mt. ToBeRead. His analysis is very sharp--you know exactly what he likes and dislikes about the books he's reviewing (and sometimes the authors as well) and there are very solid reasons behind those preferences. Imaginary Homelands is packed full of these reviews, ranging from Nadine Gordimer to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Gunter Grass to V.S. Naipaul.

The essays range over the usual Rushdie topics: immigration, British racism, Indira Gandhi, making sense of success, religion, and the beginnings of the Satanic Verses fatwa. My favorite essays are centered around his trip to an Australian literary festival followed by a cross-country road trip with author Bruce Chatwin that became the basis for Chatwin's book Songlines. On the whole, I didn't like these essays as much as the ones in Step Across This Line, mainly because a lot of them dealt with topical political issues that, since the book was published in 1992, are a bit out of date.