3. Birth, Early Life & Career:
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, born on 19 June 1947. He
is a British Indian novelist and essayist. Much of his
fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is the son
of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a University of Cambridgeeducated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin Bhatt,
a teacher, Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, into a
Muslim family of Kashmiri descent. Rushdie has three
sisters. He wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father
adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes. He
was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School in
Mumbai, Rugby School, and King's College, University
of Cambridge, where he studied history.Rushdie's first
career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising
agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with
"irresistibubble" for Aero and for the agency Ayer
Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll
do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at
Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before
becoming a full-time writer.
4. 1975: GRIMUS
Grimus is a 1975 fantasy and science fiction novel. It
was Rushdie’s literary debut. The story loosely follows
Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift
of immortality after drinking a magic fluid. After
drinking the fluid, Flapping Eagle wanders the earth
for 777 years 7 months and 7 days, searching for his
immortal sister and exploring identities before falling
through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea. He arrives
in a parallel dimension at the mystical Calf Island
where those immortals who have tired of the world but
are reluctant to give up their immortality exist in a
static community under a subtle and sinister authority.
Rent it from JustBooks
5. 1976: First Marriage.
Rushdie has been married four times.
He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from
1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980).
6. 1980: MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
Midnight's Children deals with India's transition
from British colonialism to independence and
the partition of British India. It is considered an
example of postcolonial literature and magical
realism. The story is told by its chief protagonist,
Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual
historical events as with historical fiction.It won both
the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize in. It was awarded the "Booker of Bookers"
Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and
2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th
anniversary. In 2003, the novel was listed on
the BBC's survey The Big Read.It was also added to
the list of Great Books of the 20th Century, published
Rent it from JustBooks by Penguin Books.
7. 1983 : SHAME
Rent it from JustBooks
Shame is Rushdie's third novel, published in 1983.
Like most of Rushdie's work, this book was written in
the style of magic realism. It portrays the lives
of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Iskander Harappa)
and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (General Raza
Hyder) and their relationship. The central theme of
the novel is that violence is born out of shame. The
concepts of 'shame' and 'shamelessness' are
explored through all of the characters, with main
focus on Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyám.
Shame discusses heritage, authenticity, truth, and, of
course, shame and shamelessness, as well as the
impact of all these themes on an individual, the
protagonist Omar Khayyám.
8. 1987: THE JAGUAR SMILE: A NICARAGUAN
JOURNEY
In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the
people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of
Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the
palpable human facts of a country in the midst of
revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What
he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult,
often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and
warrior-poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous
range of people, from the foreign minister to the
midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room. His
perceptions always heightened by his sensitivity and
his unique flair for language, in The Jaguar Smile,he
brings us the true Nicaragua, where nothing is simple,
everything is contested, and life&death struggles are
Rent it from JustBooks an everyday
occurrence.
9. 1988: Second Marriage
His second wife was the American novelist Marianne
Wiggins. They were married in 1988 and divorced in
1993
10. 3 August 1989: Failed assassination
attempt and Hezbollah's comments
While Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh was
priming a book bomb loaded
with RDX explosive in a hotel in Paddington,
Central London, the bomb exploded
prematurely, destroying two floors of the
hotel and killing Mazeh. A previously
unknown Lebanese group, the Organization
of the Mujahidin of Islam, said he died
preparing an attack "on the apostate
Rushdie James Phillips of the Heritage
Foundation testified before the United States
Congress that a "March 1989“ explosion in
Britain was a Hezbollah attempt to
assassinate Rushdie that failed when a
bomb exploded prematurely, killing a
Hezbollah terrorist in London.
11. 1990: HAROUN & THE SEA OF STORIES
In A Sad City, The Saddest Of Cities, A City So Ruinously
Sad That It Had Forgotten Its Name, Lived A Professional
Storyteller Named Rashid And His Son Haroun.' Thus
Begins Rushdie & Rsquo;S Magical And Delightful Book,
Which Is Comprised Of Hundreds Of Stories, Funny And
Sad, All Of Them Juggled At Once, Together With Sorcery
And Love, Wicked Uncles And Fat Aunts, And Mustachioed
Gangsters In Yellow Check Pants.
Rent it from JustBooks
12. 1992: IMAGINARY HOMELANDS
Drawing from two political and several literary
homelands, this collection presents a remarkable
series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full
range and force of his remarkable imaginative and
observational powers. With candour, eloquence and
indignation he carefully examines an expanse of
topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan,
censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity,
contemporary film and late-twentieth century race,
religion and politics. Elsewhere he trains his eye on
literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on
love to the politics of George Orwell's 'Inside the
Whale', providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S.
Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Raymond
Rent it from JustBooks Carver,
Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon
among others.
13. 1994: EAST, WEST
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Satanic
Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic
distances and the unexpected intimacies between
East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical and
humane, this book renews Rushdie's stature as a
storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the
same sentence.
Rent it from JustBooks
14. 1995: THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH
Moares 'Moor' Zogoiby is a 'high-born crossbreed', the
last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinise spice
merchants and crime lords. He is also a compulsive
storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that
takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a
labyrinthine tale of mad passions and volcanic family
hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised
offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike
beyond the grave. The Moor's Last Sigh is a
spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical and
compassionate novel. It is a love song to a vanishing
world, but also its last hurrah.
Rent it from JustBooks
15. 1997: Third Marriage
His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was
Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born
1999).
16. 1999: THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
It is a variation on the Orpheus myth with rock
music replacing Orpheus' lyre. The myth works as a
red thread from which the author sometimes strays,
but to which he attaches an endless series of
references.
The book, while at its core detailing the love of two
men, Ormus and Umeed, for the same woman, Vina,
provides a background and alternate history to the
entire 1950s-1990s period of the growth of rock
music. The minor characters of the story are
particularly interesting, as they provide the most vivid
portraits of the cultures and backgrounds that come
into play in the story.
Rent it from JustBooks
17. 2001: FURY
Fury opens on a New York living at breakneck speed
in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik
Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker
extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons
his family without a word of explanation, and flees to
New York. There is a fury within him, and he fears that
he has become dangerous to those he loves. He
arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty,
in the highest hour of America's wealth and power,
seeking to "erase" himself. But fury is all around him.
A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of
concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments
of the metropolis engulf him. Meanwhile, his own
thoughts, emotions and desires are also running wild.
Rent it from JustBooks A young woman in a D'Angelo baseball cap is in
.store.
18. In 2004, he married the Indian American Padma
Lakshmi, an actress, model, and host of the American
reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended
on 2 July 2007, with Lakshmi's indicating it was her
desire to end it.
19. 2005: SHALIMAR THE CLOWN
Shalimar the Clown has attracted significant attention,
comparable to his earlier publications, particularly The
Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children. Shalimar
the Clown derives its name from Shalimar Gardens, in
the vicinity of Srinagar, one of several Mughal
Gardens, which were laid out in several parts
of undivided India when the Mughals reigned over the
subcontinent. Shalimar is the name of one of the
characters featured in the novel.
Rent it from JustBooks
20. 16 June 2007 : Rushdie was knighted
Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in
the Queen's Birthday Honours . In response to his
knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities
protested. Parliamentarians of several of these
countries condemned the action, and Iran and
Pakistan called in their British envoys to protest
formally. Controversial condemnation issued by
Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Ijazul-Haq was in turn rebuffed by former Prime
Minister Benazir Bhutto. Ironically, their respective
fathers Zia-ul-Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been
earlier portrayed in Rushdie's novel Shame. Mass
demonstrations against Rushdie's knighthood took
place in Pakistan and Malaysia. Several called
publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed
disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming
that the writer did not merit such an honour and
there were several other writers who deserved the
knighthood more than Rushdie.
21. 2008: THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE
The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a
mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to
possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery,
attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s
world. It is the story of two cities at the height of their
powers–the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the
brilliant emperor Akbar the Great wrestles daily with
questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his
sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during
the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli
takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about
the true brutality of power. Profoundly moving and
completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is
a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s
Rent it from JustBooks most important living writers.
22. 2010: LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE
On a beautiful starry night in the city of Kahani in the
land of Alifbay a terrible thing happened: twelve-yearold Lukas storyteller father, Rashid, fell suddenly and
inexplicably into a sleep so deep that nothing and no
one could rouse him. To save him from slipping away
entirely, Luka must embark on a journey through the
Magic World, encountering a slew of
phantasmagorical obstacles along the way, to steal
the Fire of Life, a seemingly impossible and
exceedingly dangerous task.With Haroun and the Sea
of Stories Salman Rushdie proved that he is one of
the best contemporary writers of fables, and it proved
to be one of his most popular books with readers of all
ages.
Rent it from JustBooks
23. 2012: JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR
On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman
Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told
that he had been “sentenced to death” by the
Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the
word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel
called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of
being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.”
So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was
forced underground, moving from house to house,
with the constant presence of an armed police
protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that
the police could call him by. He thought of writers he
loved and combinations of their names; then it came
to him: Conrad and Chekhov
27. Avid+
Regular
Rs.4750/Year
2
Books at a time
Refundable Deposit
Rs.1000
3
Books at a time
4
Books at a time
2
Magazines at a time
Refundable Deposit
Rs.1000
No Registration Fee
No Refundable Deposit
Signup
Signup
Signup
Basic
Rs.250/Month
Rs.300/Month