Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 [Paperback]

“Read every page of this book; better still, re-read them. The invocation means no hardship, since every true reader must surely be captivated by Rushdie’s masterful invention and ease, the flow of wit and insight and passion. How literature of the highest order can serve the interests of our common humanity is freshly illustrated here: a defence of his past, a promise for the future, and a surrender to nobody or nothing whatever except his own all-powerful imagination.”-Michael Foot,Observer

Salman Rushdie’sImaginary Homelandsis an important record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects –the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie’s contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression. For this paperback edition, the author has written a new essay to mark the third anniversary of the fatwa.Imaginary HomelandsIntroduction
1
Imaginary Homelands
Errata : Or, Unreliable Narration inMidnight's Children
The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987

2
Censorship
The Assassination of Indira Gandhi
Dynasty
Zia ul-Haq. 17 August 1988
Daughter of the East

3
Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist
Anita Desai
Kipling
Hobson-Jobson

4
Outside the Whale
Attenborough's Gandhi
Satyajit Ray
Handsworth Songs
The Location ofBrazil

5
The New Empire within Britain
An Unimportant Fire
Home Front
V. S. Naipaul
The Painter and the Pest

6
A General Election
Charter 88
On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said

7
Nadine Gordimer
Rian Malan
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