Languages of truth: essays 2003-2020

This essay and speeches originally appeared in different forms I Am Not Yet Dead from the musical Monty Python's Spamalot written by Eric Idle, music by John Du Prez in 2004.

Table of Contents

Part One
Wonder Tales
Proteus
Heraclitus
Another Writer's Beginnings

Part Two
Philip Roth
Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five
Samuel Beckett's Novels
Cervantes and Shakespeare
Gabo and I
Harold Pinter
Introduction to the Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV
Autobiography and the Novel
Adaptation
Notes on Sloth: From Saligia to Oblomov
Hans Christian Andersen
King of the World by David Remnick
Very Well Then, I Contradict Myself

Part Three
Truth
Courage
Texts for pen
1 The Pen and the Sword
2 The Birth of Pen World Voices
3 The Arthur Miller Lecture, 2012
4 Pen World Voices Opening Night 2014
5 Pen World Voices Opening Night 2017
Christopher Hitchens
The Liberty Instinct
Osama Bin Laden
Ai Weiwei and Others
The Half-Woman God
Nova Southeastern University Commencement Address 2006
Emory University Commencement Address 2015

Part Four
The Composite Artist: the Emperor Akbar and the Making of the Hamzanama
Amrita Sher-Gil: Letters
Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003)
Being Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits at the Gagosian Gallery, London, 2005
Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar at the Whitney Museum, New York, 2007
Kara Walker at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2009
Sebastião Salgado
The Unbeliever's Christmas
Carrie Fisher
Pandemic: A Personal Engagement with the Coronavirus
The Proust Questionnaire: Vanity Fair

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, 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.

https://penguin.co.in/book/languages-of-truth/