NEW YORK (AP) —
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 “five interlinked stories and novellas that explore the eternal mysteries of the eleventh hour of life,” can be launched Nov. 4.
In keeping with Random Home, Rushdie’s new e book will embrace such “unforgettable characters” as a “musical prodigy with a magical gift,” the ghost of a Cambridge don who helps a scholar “avenge the tormentor of his lifetime” and a literary mentor who has mysteriously died. “The Eleventh Hour” is ready in three elements of the world the place Rushdie has lived: India, England and the U.S.
“The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last 12 months, explore themes and places that have been much on my mind — mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America. And Goya and Kafka and Bosch as well,” Rushdie mentioned in a press release launched by means of Random Home. “I’m happy that the stories, very different from one another in setting, story, and technique, nevertheless manage to be in conversation with one another, and with the two stories that serve as prologue and epilogue to this threesome. I have come to think of the quintet as a single work, and I hope readers may see and enjoy it in the same way.”
Rushdie’s fiction, notably the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children,” has introduced him his biggest acclaim. His different novels embrace “Shame,” “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “Victory City,” 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 within the trial towards his assailant, Hadi Matar. A jury discovered Matar responsible 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.
Rushdie’s memoir concerning the assault, “Knife,” was printed final 12 months and was a finalist for a Nationwide Guide 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 loss of life 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 on lasting nerve injury.
Selling “Knife” in 2024, Rushdie instructed The Related Press that earlier than writing the memoir, he had tried fiction. However he acknowledged that the assault had change into not possible to disregard.
“I didn’t want to write this book,” he mentioned of “Knife” on the time. “I actually wanted to get back to fiction, and I tried and it just seemed stupid. I just thought, ‘Look, something very big happened to you.’”
