Politics & Government
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Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020
Newly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction from the first two decades of the twenty-first century-including many texts never previously in print-by the Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author
Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Salman Rushdie is celebrated as "a master of perpetual storytelling" (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.
Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie's intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, whether on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of "truth," revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism, and censorship.
Enlivened on every page by Rushdie's signature wit and dazzling voice, Languages of Truth offers the author's most piercingly analytical views yet on the evolution of literature and culture even as he takes us on an exhilarating tour of his own exuberant and fearless imagination.
Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Salman Rushdie is celebrated as "a master of perpetual storytelling" (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.
Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie's intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, whether on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of "truth," revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism, and censorship.
Enlivened on every page by Rushdie's signature wit and dazzling voice, Languages of Truth offers the author's most piercingly analytical views yet on the evolution of literature and culture even as he takes us on an exhilarating tour of his own exuberant and fearless imagination.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Languages of Truth
"Mesmerizing . . . Rushdie's writing is erudite and full of sympathy, brimming with insight and wit: ‘Literature has never lost sight of what our quarrelsome world is trying to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradiction.' Rushdie's fans will be delighted."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Wide-ranging nonfiction pieces by the distinguished novelist, unified by his commitment to artistic freedom and his adamant opposition to censorship in any form. . . . This collection . . . showcases his generous spirit, dedicated to illuminating the work of fellow artists and defending their right to unfettered creativity. . . . Engagingly passionate, and endlessly informative: a literary treat."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Praise for Salman Rushdie
"He is a legend. . . . His is not only an enviable talent, it's a revelatory mind [displaying] a profound knowledge of history, culture, human frailty, and triumph."-Toni Morrison
"One of the greatest writers of our age . . . a giant of literature."-Neil Gaiman
"Rushdie is our Scheherazade."-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
"A master of metamorphosis-transforming life, art and language in the subterranean maze of his imagination."-Don DeLillo
"A storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air."-The New York Times Book Review
"Mesmerizing . . . Rushdie's writing is erudite and full of sympathy, brimming with insight and wit: ‘Literature has never lost sight of what our quarrelsome world is trying to force us to forget. Literature rejoices in contradiction.' Rushdie's fans will be delighted."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Wide-ranging nonfiction pieces by the distinguished novelist, unified by his commitment to artistic freedom and his adamant opposition to censorship in any form. . . . This collection . . . showcases his generous spirit, dedicated to illuminating the work of fellow artists and defending their right to unfettered creativity. . . . Engagingly passionate, and endlessly informative: a literary treat."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Praise for Salman Rushdie
"He is a legend. . . . His is not only an enviable talent, it's a revelatory mind [displaying] a profound knowledge of history, culture, human frailty, and triumph."-Toni Morrison
"One of the greatest writers of our age . . . a giant of literature."-Neil Gaiman
"Rushdie is our Scheherazade."-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
"A master of metamorphosis-transforming life, art and language in the subterranean maze of his imagination."-Don DeLillo
"A storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air."-The New York Times Book Review
Readers Top Reviews
T. KeplerFTSonali Si
Compliments Rushdie's earlier work of essays, Step Across this Line, which I highly recommend. Mr. Rushdie exudes the Arts like honey from the morning dew, or from the hive, as sometimes it stings yet its flavor remains sweet. His intellect is clear, his wit sharp, and imagination nearly unbounded. Near the end of the book, the author reflects on his bout with the COVID virus infection which fortunately he survived.
Cory Brooks
Rushdie might me culturally omniscient -- he's read everything that can be read, and watched everything that can be watched, and can write about what he's read and what he's watched in a compelling way. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in essays, culture, Salman Rushdie, or general nonfiction. Rushdie is a treasure, I hope he writes more essays.
kathleen g
What a treat. This collection of 38 essays, divided into four sections, comprises previously published essays, unpublished essays and speeches. Rushdie has always been a vibrant writer and incisive commentator and this collection highlights his interest in truth, language, and art. It's impossible to categorize. I dipped in and out to savor the philosophical perspective he brings to everything as well as the writing. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. One to put by your side.
Deedi Brown
Languages of Truth is a collection of essays and speeches that Salman Rushdie has written or delivered over the years. Most of these are relatively short, which makes it digestible and easy to pick away at over time. Topics range from literature and writing to world events and dedications. My favorite ones were actually the first three in the book (the ones on storytelling), which were also read by Rushdie himself in the audiobook. I did read (or listen to) all of this one, but there were definitely some essays that I didn’t follow or understand as well as others, just because he was talking about an author or an event that I wasn’t familiar with. So I’d encourage you not to be afraid to skip around and over anything that doesn’t seem like it’s for you; the book will still be worth your time. All in all, I’m always glad to have more of Rushdie’s brain in my brain!
KasaC
This may be my favorite book this year. So much to address here, so much richness on full display on a number of subjects and of course, literature being the most prominent as that is the what most people think of when they think of Sir Rushdie. Along with the publication of George Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, several of the entries included in this anthology present a master class in the understanding and exploration of the finer points of literature, as Rushdie has included lectures from his teachings at Emory University. But it is his lifelong love of beauty and appreciation of art and artists that add additional shades to this collection. Then again, there are musings on authors who have meant so much to him, presented with wit and humanity. The fact that he has counted many friends among his subjects gives these an immediacy. There are pieces he wrote as introductions to exhibition catalogues, addresses presented to the PEN Gala, and pieces honoring great dear friends as only he can. Given the two novels he has published during years when America threatened to devolve into Trumpistan, I was not surprised at the NY Times article Truth in which he succinctly and eloquently provides the strongest argument against the perceived danger to art and artists presented by the "cabinet of billionaires." Altogether, this collection form a portrait of a man of exceedingly acute perception and humanity.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Wonder Tales
1
Before there were books, there were stories. At first the stories weren't written down. Sometimes they were even sung. Children were born, and before they could speak, their parents sang them songs, a song about an egg that fell off a wall, perhaps, or about a boy and a girl who went up a hill and fell down it. As the children grew older, they asked for stories almost as often as they asked for food. Now there was a goose that laid golden eggs, or a boy who sold the family cow for a handful of magic beans, or a naughty rabbit trespassing on a dangerous farmer's land. The children fell in love with these stories and wanted to hear them over and over again. Then they grew older and found those stories in books. And other stories that they had never heard before, about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, or a silly old bear and an easily scared piglet and a gloomy donkey, or a phantom tollbooth, or a place where wild things were. They heard and read stories and they fell in love with them, Mickey in the night kitchen with magic bakers who all looked like Oliver Hardy, and Peter Pan, who thought death would be an awfully big adventure, and Bilbo Baggins under a mountain winning a riddle contest against a strange creature who had lost his precious, and the act of falling in love with stories awakened something in the children that would nourish them all their lives: their imagination.
The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly the stories fell away from them, the stories were packed away in boxes in the attic, and it became harder for the former children to tell and receive stories, harder for them, sadly, to fall in love. For some of them, stories began to seem irrelevant, unnecessary: kids' stuff. These were sad people, and we must pity them and try not to think of them as stupid boring philistine losers.
I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. As adults, falling in love less easily, we may end up with only a handful of books that we can truly say we love. Maybe this is why we make so many bad judgments.
Nor is this love unconditional or eternal. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song. When, as a college student, I first read Günter Grass's great novel The Tin Drum, I was unable to finish it. It languished on a shelf for fully ten years before I gave it a second chance, whereupon it became one of my favorite novels of all time: one of the books I would say that I love. It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.
I grew up in Bombay, India, a city that is no longer, today, at all like the city it once was and has even changed its name to the much less euphonious Mumbai, in a time so unlike the present that it feels impossibly remote, even fantastic: a real-life version of the mythic golden age. Childhood, as A. E. Housman reminds us in "The Land of Lost Content," often also called "Blue Remembered Hills," is the country to which we all once belonged and will all eventually lose:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
In that far-off Bombay, the stories and books that reached me from the West seemed like true tales of wonder. Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," with its splinters of magic mirror that entered people's bloodstreams and turned their hearts to ice, was even more terrifying to a boy from the tropics, where the only ice was in the refrigerator. "The Emperor's New Clothes" felt especially enjoyable to a boy growing up in the immediate aftermath of the British Empir...
1
Before there were books, there were stories. At first the stories weren't written down. Sometimes they were even sung. Children were born, and before they could speak, their parents sang them songs, a song about an egg that fell off a wall, perhaps, or about a boy and a girl who went up a hill and fell down it. As the children grew older, they asked for stories almost as often as they asked for food. Now there was a goose that laid golden eggs, or a boy who sold the family cow for a handful of magic beans, or a naughty rabbit trespassing on a dangerous farmer's land. The children fell in love with these stories and wanted to hear them over and over again. Then they grew older and found those stories in books. And other stories that they had never heard before, about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, or a silly old bear and an easily scared piglet and a gloomy donkey, or a phantom tollbooth, or a place where wild things were. They heard and read stories and they fell in love with them, Mickey in the night kitchen with magic bakers who all looked like Oliver Hardy, and Peter Pan, who thought death would be an awfully big adventure, and Bilbo Baggins under a mountain winning a riddle contest against a strange creature who had lost his precious, and the act of falling in love with stories awakened something in the children that would nourish them all their lives: their imagination.
The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly the stories fell away from them, the stories were packed away in boxes in the attic, and it became harder for the former children to tell and receive stories, harder for them, sadly, to fall in love. For some of them, stories began to seem irrelevant, unnecessary: kids' stuff. These were sad people, and we must pity them and try not to think of them as stupid boring philistine losers.
I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. As adults, falling in love less easily, we may end up with only a handful of books that we can truly say we love. Maybe this is why we make so many bad judgments.
Nor is this love unconditional or eternal. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song. When, as a college student, I first read Günter Grass's great novel The Tin Drum, I was unable to finish it. It languished on a shelf for fully ten years before I gave it a second chance, whereupon it became one of my favorite novels of all time: one of the books I would say that I love. It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.
I grew up in Bombay, India, a city that is no longer, today, at all like the city it once was and has even changed its name to the much less euphonious Mumbai, in a time so unlike the present that it feels impossibly remote, even fantastic: a real-life version of the mythic golden age. Childhood, as A. E. Housman reminds us in "The Land of Lost Content," often also called "Blue Remembered Hills," is the country to which we all once belonged and will all eventually lose:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
In that far-off Bombay, the stories and books that reached me from the West seemed like true tales of wonder. Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," with its splinters of magic mirror that entered people's bloodstreams and turned their hearts to ice, was even more terrifying to a boy from the tropics, where the only ice was in the refrigerator. "The Emperor's New Clothes" felt especially enjoyable to a boy growing up in the immediate aftermath of the British Empir...
