Synopses & Reviews
It all begins with a letter. Fall in love with Penguin Drop Caps, a new series of twenty-six collectible and hardcover editions, each with a type cover showcasing a gorgeously illustrated letter of the alphabet. In a design collaboration between Jessica Hische and Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, the series features unique cover art by Hische, a superstar in the world of type design and illustration, whose work has appeared everywhere from Tiffany and Co. to Wes Anderson's recent film
Moonrise Kingdom to Penguin's own bestsellers
Committed and
Rules of Civility. With exclusive designs that have never before appeared on Hische's hugely popular Daily Drop Cap blog, the Penguin Drop Caps series debuted with an 'A' for Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice, a 'B' for Charlotte Brönte's
Jane Eyre, and a 'C' for Willa Cather's
My Ántonia. It continues with more perennial classics, perfect to give as elegant gifts or to showcase on your own shelves.
R is for Rushdie. Set in an exotic Eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Salman Rushdies classic childrens novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as Gullivers Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. Haroun, a 12-year-old boy sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.
Synopsis
-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.
About the Author
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels
Grimus,
Midnights Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker),
Shame,
The Satanic Verses,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
The Moors Last Sigh,
The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
Fury,
Shalimar the Clown,
The Enchantress of Florence, and
Luka and the Fire of Lifeand one collection of short stories:
East, West. He has also published three works of nonfiction:
The Jaguar Smile,
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991, and
Step Across This Line, coedited two anthologies,
Mirrorwork and
Best American Short Stories 2008, and published
Joseph Anton: A Memoir. His numerous literary prizes include the Booker Prize for
Midnight's Children and the Whitbread Prize for
The Satanic Verses.
Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, typographer, and web designer. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club board of directors, has been named a Forbes Magazine "30 under 30" in art and design as well as an ADC Young Gun and one of Print Magazines "New Visual Artists". She has designed for Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, Tiffany and Co, Penguin Books and many others. She resides primarily in San Francisco, occasionally in Brooklyn.
Table of Contents
Imaginary Homelands Introduction
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