Salman Rushdie has a set of novellas and brief tales popping out this fall, his first printed fiction since being stabbed repeatedly and hospitalized in 2022.
Random Home introduced Thursday that Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour, billed by the writer as “5 interlinked tales and novellas that discover the everlasting mysteries of the eleventh hour of life,” will likely be launched Nov. 4.
In accordance with Random Home, Rushdie’s new e-book will embody such “unforgettable characters” as a “musical prodigy with a magical reward,” the ghost of a Cambridge don who helps a pupil “avenge the tormentor of his lifetime” and a literary mentor who has mysteriously died. The Eleventh Hour is about in three components of the world the place Rushdie has lived: India, England and the U.S.
“The three novellas on this quantity, all written within the final 12 months, discover themes and locations which were a lot on my thoughts — mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (particularly Cambridge), anger, peace, America. And Goya and Kafka and Bosch as nicely,” Rushdie mentioned in a press release launched by Random Home. “I am pleased that the tales, very totally different from each other in setting, story, and method, however handle to be in dialog with each other, and with the 2 tales that function prologue and epilogue to this threesome. I’ve come to think about the quintet as a single work, and I hope readers might even see and luxuriate in it in the identical manner.”
Rushdie’s fiction, notably the Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Kids, has introduced him his best acclaim. His different novels embody Disgrace, The Moor’s Final Sigh and Victory Metropolis, which he accomplished shortly earlier than the stabbing on a lecture stage on the Chautauqua Establishment in western New York.
In February, the 77-year-old Rushdie returned to the realm and testified in the trial towards his assailant, Hadi Matar. A jury found Matar guilty of assault and tried homicide, convictions that might result in as much as 25 years in jail. The choose has set sentencing for April 23.
The Present26:49Salman Rushdie on the 27 seconds that just about ended his life
The person who stabbed writer Salman Rushdie on a New York stage in 2022 has been convicted of tried homicide and assault. In a dialog from final yr, Rushdie tells Matt Galloway about writing to maneuver previous the assault and what he intends to do together with his “second likelihood” at life.
Rushdie’s memoir in regards to the assault, Knife, was published last year and was a finalist for a National Book Award. However he has spoken of fiction as an indication of additional therapeutic and restored imaginative powers, whether or not after being pressured into hiding in 1989 due to the fatwa calling for his demise over the alleged blasphemy of the novel The Satanic Verses or recovering from the assault three years in the past that blinded him in a single eye and brought about lasting nerve harm.
Selling Knife in 2024, Rushdie told The Associated Press that earlier than writing the memoir, he had tried fiction. However he acknowledged that the assault had develop into inconceivable to disregard.
“I did not wish to write this e-book,” he mentioned of Knife on the time. “I really needed to get again to fiction, and I attempted and it simply appeared silly. I simply thought, ‘Look, one thing very huge occurred to you.'”
