Salman Rushdie

Midnight's Children, For Those Who Wants the Gist of the Novel (And No More)

I Was Tossed Out Of The Friars Club The Other Night

I'd been invited to cover a competition whereby three comics were going to roast cookbook author and Salman Rushdie's ex, Padma Lakshmi, as if she were curried butternut squash and chickpeas. My friend and I got there and sat around the foyer waiting for the roasting room to open up, but the public ... More >>

Katie Kitamura Celebrates Gone to the Forest Release at WORD

She'll be joined in conversation by award-winning author Adam Rapp and journalist Sarah Weinman.

After Batman Theater Shooting, Rightbloggers Rush to Defend What's Important: Guns, Themselves

Last week's terrible incident in Aurora, Colorado in which 70 people were shot, 12 fatally, at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises made many of us think about how awful these episodes of senseless violence are, how precious and fragile life is, and that we should stay close and be good to ou ... More >>

Christopher Hitchens's Contradictory Legacy

Crusades, holy men, and devils

Salman Rushdie Fights Facebook, Wins

​The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie is an enthusiastic tweeter. He often prompts his followers to play games like "Literary Smackdowns" (Joan Didion vs. Susan Sontag, for example), and today he started a new one: blasting Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook deactivated Rushdie's page, thinking it ... More >>

Salman Rushdie Joins the Save the St. Mark's Bookshop Effort

​The petition to save St. Mark's Bookshop has now reached nearly 44,000 names, and one of the latest celebrity supporters of the store is Salman Rushdie, who recently wrote a letter to Cooper Union President Jamshed Bharucha urging the school to decrease the bookshop's rent by $5,000 a month, ... More >>

It's Fathers' Day; Obama and Boehner Golf Together; Four Die in Montauk-Bound Cessna

via AP​Today is Father's Day! Call your Dad and grill something. Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner had a friendly lil' round of golf yesterday with Joe Biden and Ohio Governor John Kasich, and it fixed America. [The Atlantic Wire / Politico] A Manhattan family died yesterday in a ... More >>

POWER OF WORDS

Celebrating why PEN is mightier than the sword

Rightbloggers Denounce Stewart - Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity Cat Stevens

On Saturday in Washington Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive. The purpose of the event, which drew more than 200,000 people, was to help Cat Stevens win support for his fatwa against Salman Rushdie. What, you didn't know that? You must have mis ... More >>

The New York Post 'Snarks' Brooklyn Books, Sarah Silverman, and Paul Krugman

​Predictably nasty New York Post film critic Kyle Smith is now apparently telling his readers what else to do on the weekends. Not that he really should, but Smith obviously doesn't give a shit what Post readers are doing on the weekend, because he apparently wrote one entry just to be a cruel ... More >>

WELCOME TO BOOK-LYN

A star-studded celebration of literature

Capital New York: Now Officially, Totally, Completely Alive

​We've come a long way from Talk Magazine, back when a bunch of writers doing something new meant a Robert Isbell-planned party on Liberty Island and George Plimpton drunkenly screaming at Salman Rushdie while he was busy trying to close on Padma. Yet, now, in an era when "editorial launch" me ... More >>

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Being an (Alleged) Plagiarist, or Whatever It Is You're Good at

​Proving that plagiarism doesn't ruin your career (at all) we have the case of Kaavya Viswanathan, the lit wunderkind who scored a reported $500,000 two-book deal while still in high school, had the first of her chick-lit novels published her sophomore year at Harvard, and then got busted for ... More >>

FDA Questions How Smart 'Smart Choices' Is; Matchboxes Make a Comeback

​Salman Rushdie is, allegedly, still obsessed with ex-wife, Padma Lakshmi, according to his ex-girlfriend, actress Pia Glenn. She said he could talk about the Top Chef host "day and night." [NY Post] Mill Basin Kosher Deli is celebrating its 36th year in business with discounts through the en ... More >>

Our 10 Best: Reasons to Hate 'Top Chef'

​ ​Here's why we thought this was going to be the Season of the Beard, and that excessive tattoos would be banished forever. Were we ever wrong! Yes, we watch Top Chef obsessively. We can't help it. But we hate ourselves the next morning, and here are the reasons why, in reverse order. ... More >>

Dredg

THE MIGHTY PEN

The annual fest for lit lovers returns

Christopher Hitchens Calls Mos Def "Mr. Definitely" on Bill Maher

One of the things most entertaining slash most infuriating about rappers straying, whether intentionally or otherwise, onto political talk shows is the inability of their hosts and fellow guests to call them by their given names. Hence a smirking Dennis Miller calling Young Jeezy both "Emphysema" ... More >>

THE SHORT VERSES

Salman Rushdie discusses his Best American anthology picks

HELPING HANDS

An evening with Orhan Pamuk and Salman Rushdie

Tuesday

THE WRITE STUFF

170 writers from 51 countries in just six days

In Memoriam: Amanda Smith (1944-2008)

An elegy for a fellow dance critic

PEN World Voices Festival

Top Chef: Who are these people?

Mehta Fiction

Enjoying the source of the latest plagiarism scandal

The Believer Hosts a Literary Variety Show at the PEN Fest

'9/11/03: A Day in the Life of New York'

Tragic Realism

It breaks a village: In Rushdie's latest book, a cuckold turns to terrorism

PEN Pals: Literary Celebration Promotes Multiculturalism

Fear of Flying

Whistle-blowers say the FAA ignored a decade of pre–9-11 warnings

The Rushdie Connection

D'Amour's Labor of New Orleans Love

Subdued New York Outcry for a Censored British Artist

Heroic Restraint

The tongue is mightier than the sword

When Reading the 'Wrong' Books May Lead to a Sentence

Burning Bush

Rushdie Rocks A Reading, Maestro Bumps The Quad, Tapis Rouge Goes Gay

Taslima Nasrin Speaks (Still)

Not Your Father's Fatwa

Out of India

Oh Calcutta!

Orpheus Ascending

Follow the Reader

Around the Word in 90 Days

Excitable Reviewers Reviewed

The Best Article of the Year!

Listings

The Literati and Their Servers

The Two Faces of Carl Bernstein

Wide World Webs

Three Ways To Purée a Planet

Rock of Ages

Hide and Speak

Journalist Cyberstung