ONLINE: Salman Rushdie

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths

"Quichotte" author Salman Rushdie.

Salman Rushdie, Wednesday, June 17, 7 pm (note date change): It's been decades since Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the execution of author Salman Rushdie over the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. The author survived and has been prolific since. The Wisconsin Book Festival had hoped to host Rushdie for an appearance around his latest book, Quichotte (a Man Booker Prize-nominated novel inspired by Don Quixote), but had trouble landing the booking. Now the festival is teaming up with book festivals from around the country to co-sponsor a video appearance of the author.

press release: Given the events across the country over the past week, and particularly those in Minneapolis, Wisconsin Book Festival and our partner organizations, in concert with the author, have decided to postpone our event for Salman Rushdie's Quichotte until June 17, at 7pm. We take this step in the interest of giving proper weight to the reasons behind the protests. We also want to allow the opportunity for a full discussion of Salman's work. We look forward to the event and appreciate your understanding.​

Presented in partnership with The Believer Festival, Literary Arts, and The Loft's WordPlay, Salman Rushdie will appear live on Crowdcast. Join us at: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/quichotte

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.