Front cover image for Languages of truth : essays 2003-2020

Languages of truth : essays 2003-2020

Salman Rushdie (Author)
"Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, illuminating deep truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing, prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word, and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time. Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2019, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie's own intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, often by telling vivid, sometimes humorous stories of his own personal encounters with them, whether on the page or in person. He delves deeper than ever before into the nature of "truth," revels in the vibrant malleability of language, and the creative lines that can join art and life, and he looks anew at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. The ideas, true stories and arguments presented here are at once revelatory, funny and eye-opening, enlivened on every page by Rushdie's signature wit and dazzling voice, making this volume a genuine pleasure to read"-- Provided by publisher
eBook, English, 2021
Random House, New York, 2021
essays
1 online resource (356 pages)
9780593133187, 0593133188
1183399262
Part One
Wonder Tales
Proteus
Heraclitus
Another Writer's Beginnings
Part Two
Philip Roth
Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five
Samuel Beckett's Novels
Cervantes and Shakespeare
Gabo and I
Harold Pinter
Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, Vol. IV
Autobiography and the Novel
Adaptation
Notes on Sloth
Hans Christian Andersen
David Remnick's King of the World
Very Well Then, I Contradict Myself
Part Three
Truth
Courage
Texts for PEN
Christopher Hitchens
The Liberty Instinct
Osama Bin Laden
Ai Weiwei and Others
The Half-Woman God
Nova Southeastern University Commencement Address 2006
Emory University Commencement Address 2015
Part Four
The Composite Artist: the Emperor Akbar and the Making of the Hamzanama
Amrita Sher-Gil: Letters
Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003)
Being Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits at the Gagosian Gallery, London, 2005
Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar at the Whitney Museum, New York, 2007
Kara Walker at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2009
Sebastião Salgado
The Unbeliever's Christmas
Carrie Fisher
Pandemic: A Personal Engagement with the Coronavirus
The Proust Questionnaire: Vanity Fair