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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
"Rushdie sets the tone in the opening essay of this stimulating collection, culled from various lectures, journalism, and introductions to books and exhibition catalogs ..."
"Even in such a ragbag, Mr."
"But the irritable Rushdie felt like the real one, or at least the wide-awake one."
"Rushdie's writing is erudite and full of sympathy, brimming with insight and wit ..."
"Though wide-ranging, many of the essays are marred by a portentous note ..."
"With reflections on everything from the rise of autofiction to Trump and Covid, a collection of Salman Rushdie's 21st-century nonfiction ought to be a treasure trove, but it feels more like watching someone rooting around down the back of the sofa for loose change ..."
"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 ..."
"Things do become clear once we settle into Rushdie's criticism, which evinces a catholic cultural appetite ..."
"Ironically, in these essays, which argue so fervently for the primacy of the unreal, it is when Rushdie is at his most directly personal, his most autobiographical, that the prose really comes to life ..."
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