Imaginary Homelands

“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.Imaginary HomelandsIntroduction
1
Imaginary Homelands
"Errata": Or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight's Children
The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987

2
Censorship
The Assassination of Indira Gandhi
Dynasty
Zia ul-Haq. 17 August 1988
Daughter of the East

3
"Commonwealth Literature" Does Not Exist
Anita Desai
Kipling
Hobson-Jobson

4
Outside the Whale
Attenborough's Gandhi
Satyajit Ray
Handsworth Songs
The Location of Brazil

5
The New Empire within Britain
An Unimportant Fire
Home Front
V. S. Naipaul
The Painter and the Pest

6
A General Election
Charter 88
On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said

7
Nadine Gordimer
Rian Malan
Nuruddin Farah
Kapuscinski's Angola

8
John Berger
Graham Greene
John le Carre
On Adventure
At the Adelaide Festival
Travelling with Chatwin
Chatwin's Travels
Julian Barnes
Kazuo Ishiguro

9
Michel Tournier
Italo Calvino
Stephen Hawking
Andrei Sakharov
Umberto Eco
Gunter Grass
Heinrich Boll
Siegfried Lenz
Peter Schneider
Christoph Ransmayr
Maurice Sendak and Wilhelm Grimm

10
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mario Vargas Llosa

11
The Language of the Pack
Debrett Goes to Hollywood
E. L. Doctorow
Michael Herr: An Interview
Richard Ford
Raymond Carver
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Philip Roth
Saul Bellow
Thomas Pynchon
Kurt Vonnegut
Grace Paley
Travels with a Golden Ass
The Divine Supermarket

12
Naipaul Among the Believers
"In God We Trust"
In Good Faith
Is Nothing Sacred?
One Thousand Days in a Balloon

Born in Bombay in 1947, Salman Rushdie is the author of six novels, including Grimus, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and a volume of essays, Imaginary Homelands. His numerous literary prizes include the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children and the Whitbread Prize for The Satanic Verses.