“Read every page of this book; better still, re-read them. The invocation means no hardship, since every true reader must surely be captivated by Rushdie’s masterful invention and ease, the flow of wit and insight and passion. How literature of the highest order can serve the interests of our common humanity is freshly illustrated here: a defence of his past, a promise for the future, and a surrender to nobody or nothing whatever except his own all-powerful imagination.”-Michael Foot, Observer Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects –the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie’s contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression. For this paperback edition, the author has written a new essay to mark the third anniversary of the fatwa.

"The effects of the displacement of peoples--their forced migration, their deportation, their voluntary emigration, their movement to new lands where they made themselves masters over others, or became subjects of the masters of their new homes--reverberate down the years and are still felt today. The historical violence of the era of empire and colonies echoes in the literature of the descendants of those forcibly moved and the exiles that those processes have made. The voices of its victims are insistent in the literature that has come to be called “post-colonial.” Although the term “post-colonial” is insufficient to capture fully the depth and breadth of those writers that have been labeled by it (for it is itself something of a colonial instrument, ghettoizing writers in English who are still considered to be “foreign”), there is a common bond among the works of those novelists who understand the process of exile and see themselves as exiles--both from their homes and from themselves. In this eloquently argued book with meticulous theoretical groundwork, Dr. Cristina Dascalu presents a most lucid and concise examination of exile. In addition to her negotiation of the term “exile,” what is most original and significant about Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile is the selection of authors. Reaching across national (in terms of country of exile) and ethnic (in terms of region/religion of birth) boundaries, Dr. Dascalu elegantly shows the persistent relevance of the experience and implications of exile to the writing of fiction in the world today. Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul are very distinct authors whose works are not often discussed together in this context. Using Benedict Anderson’s notion of “unimagined communities,” among other critical lenses, she makes significant connections between the way exile functions as a theme and as a condition for their writing."--pub. desc.

An assassin, accused of heinous acts of terror, begins his testimony by claiming responsibility for the murder of the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Salim Agha. To explain his motive, he begins by telling Salim’s story and the tragic relationship he had with his beloved nation, Pureland. Full of fascinating mysticism, Salim's life commences with a prophecy from a levitating saint: he was destined for greatness from the start. But he is born into poverty in a feudal village and the prophecy begins to fade, but his life takes a turn when his landlord, General Khan, sees something special in the boy and promises to enroll him in a prestigious school in the city. Salim’s journey is never an easy one as he is hindered by conniving servants, General Khan’s evil mother, and his internal struggle with identity. He also falls in love with Khan’s daughter, Laila, who becomes his muse as well as his curse. A beloved so powerful that he vows to do anything to win her heart. She becomes the embodiment of everything he is destined to achieve. But everything starts to crumble. In an accidental act to impress his landlord, Salim inadvertently contributes to a coup d'état that derails his nation. He manages to leave for New York in order to stand on equal footing with his landlord and win over his beloved. But over the years in exile, Pureland is taken over by the Caliphate and remorse leads Salim to try and undo this wrong - and in doing so he creates vicious enemies who vie to slay him. One such enemy is the narrator himself. Inspired by the true tragic story of Pakistan’s only Nobel Prize winning physicist, Zarrar Said's novel Pureland is a tour-de-force debut about a nation that has lost its way, its people who suffer from unspeakable tyranny, and a remorseful hero whose legacy has been wiped out by hatred.

From one of the great novelists of our day, a vital, brilliant new book of essays, speeches and articles essential for our times. Step Across This Line showcases the other side of one of fiction’s most astonishing conjurors. On display is Salman Rushdie’s incisive, thoughtful and generous mind, in prose that is as entertaining as it is topical. The world is here, captured in pieces on a dazzling array of subjects: from New York’s Amadou Diallo case to the Wizard of Oz, from U2 to fifty years of Indian writing, from a tribute to Angela Carter to the struggle to film Midnight’s Children. The title essay was originally delivered at Yale as the 2002 Tanner lecture on human values, and examines the changing meaning of frontiers in the modern world -- moral and metaphorical frontiers as well as physical ones. The collection chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual journeys, but it is also an intimate invitation into his life: he explores his relationship to India through a moving diary of his first visit there in over a decade, “A Dream of Glorious Return.” Step Across This Line also includes “Messages From the Plague Years,” a historic set of letters, articles and reflections on life under the fatwa. Gathered together for the first time, this is Rushdie’s humane, intelligent and angry response to a grotesque threat, aimed not just at him but at free expression itself. Step Across This Line, Salman Rushdie’s first collection of non-fiction in a decade, has the same energy, imagination and erudition as his astounding novels -- along with some very strong opinions.

Some twenty years after the publication of Ben Okri’s 1991 Booker Prize winning novel, The Famished Road, this volume proposes a spiralling journey into the imaginary homelands of its main protagonist, the adventurous spirit-child Azaro. Over the years, The Famished Road has been attributed a variety of mixed and sometimes contradictory labels (postcolonial, magic realist, mythopoeic, new ageist, picaresque, epic, to name just a few). Contributors to this volume have chosen to look beyond pre-conceived patterns and categories in order to embrace the otherness of the text and accept to be challenged by it. Disentangling themselves from the rationality of Western discourses, they have opened their minds to unfamiliar ground and new modes of being and seeing the world, which entailed bringing together various structures of feeling, modes of knowledge and protocols of representation, both African and Western. The purpose of this volume is therefore to offer new ways of reading The Famished Road that testify to the richness of Okri’s poetic prose and his reliance on indigenous mythical and oral traditions. The volume also includes an exclusive interview with Ben Okri who provides an insight into his writing processes and discusses the main themes, narrative techniques and literary strategies at work in The Famished Road.

A love story set in two countries in two radically different moments in time, bringing together a young man, his mother, a boa constrictor, and one capricious cat. In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war and she and her family flee. Years later, her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners, but a gay man in an unaccepting society. Aside from casual hookups, his only friend is a boa constrictor whom, improbably—he is terrified of snakes—he lets roam his apartment. Then, during a visit to a gay bar, Bekim meets a talking cat who moves in with him and his snake. It is this witty, charming, manipulative creature who starts Bekim on a journey back to Kosovo to confront his demons and make sense of the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family. And it is this that, in turn, enables him finally, to open himself to true love—which he will find in the most unexpected place

A ground-breaking study of nineteenth-century British colonial poetry. Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—often disparaged as derivative and uncouth—should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical—including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans—and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe. Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.