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Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020
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About This Book
Newly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction--including many texts never previously in print--from the first two decades of the twenty-first century by the Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, illuminating 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 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie's 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 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, whether on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of "truth," revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism, and censorship. Enlivened on every page by Rushdie's signature wit and dazzling voice, Languages of Truth offers the author's most piercingly analytical views yet on the evolution of literature and culture even as he takes us on an exhilarating tour of his own exuberant and fearless imagination.
Reviews
"a book that feels limited in its political concerns, and out of touch with the most pressing questions facing contemporary literary culture in this century."
"Much of the rest in Languages of Truth is limper and less interesting."
"A mesmerizing collection ..."
"Despite all the pop culture references, despite an apology on behalf of his generation, 'for the mess we are leaving', it becomes hard to avoid a pervasive sense of 'it weren't like that in my day' ..."
"Ravenous for life, stories, freedom, and justice, he is propelled on intellectual journeys between East and West, past and present, fact and fiction, words and image ..."
"Rushdie sets the tone in the opening essay of this stimulating collection, culled from various lectures, journalism, and introductions to books and exhibition catalogs ..."
"In the closing essay, Pandemic, Rushdie chronicles his recovery from Covid infection last year."
"From the Indian-Persian-Arabic tales of the One Thousand and One Nights to classic American fiction with its 'comedy and tragedy of the reinvented self,' Mr."
"The subtext, one can't help feeling, is that Rushdie out-Márquezed Márquez without reading him and at the same time (thanks to some coyly offstage swotting) was wise – as are 'we' all – to what he borrowed from the literature of 19th-century Brazil."
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