Writers and Copywriters: Literature and Advertising | Interesting Literature Writers and Copywriters: Literature and Advertising Posted by interestingliterature Before he wrote Midnight’s Children – the 1981 novel which would win not only the Booker Prize for that year but the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award in 1993 – Salman Rushdie worked in advertising. It was during this period in the 1970s that Rushdie came up with several classic advertising slogans: ‘Naughty but nice’ (to advertise cream cakes), ‘That’ll do nicely’ (for American Express credit cards), and ‘Irresistibubble’ (for Aero chocolate bars). He also came up with this, for the Daily Mirror: ‘Look into the Mirror tomorrow – you’ll like what you see.’ Rushdie has said that his work in advertising ‘taught me to write like a job. If you have the client coming in that afternoon for his new campaign, you can’t not have it. You have to have it.

What’s more, it has to be good.’ George Orwell may have described advertising as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’ in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), a book which shows a man with high literary ambitions being ‘reduced’ to the work of writing advertising jingles and rhymes. But Marshall McLuhan described it as ‘the greatest art form of the twentieth century’. And certainly, many popular and celebrated writers of the twentieth century and beyond have put their mark on this modern art form. Rushdie is one name among many. The author of The Satanic Verses had actually failed the initial test he took for J. Walter Thompson, a leading advertising company (which was run by none other than the thriller writer, James Patterson). But he persevered, spurred on by a friend’s assurance that it was ‘really easy’. Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. – Mark Twain Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), is another novelist who started out in the field of advertising.

In this connection she is probably most famous for writing the slogan ‘Go to work on an egg’, in support of a large advertising campaign in Britain in the 1950s supported by the Egg Marketing Board. But Weldon didn’t in fact write the slogan: it was ‘hatched’ (sorry, we couldn’t resist) by someone else, and Weldon merely helped to popularise the slogan (we say ‘merely’, but at the time Weldon occupied the senior role of Head of Copywriting and she was instrumental in making the phrase known in households up and down the country). One slogan which Weldon did write was ‘Vodka gets you drunker quicker.’ This was never used, though, as it was rejected by her bosses. (And this at a time before drink awareness was as high as it is now!) While we’re talking drink, it was Dorothy L.

Sayers, crime writer and creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who originated several Guinness slogans used in the 1920s, such as (reputedly) ‘Guinness is good for you.’ (She used her experience working in advertising for the 1933 Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Murder Must Advertise.) One legend has it that the brewery had initially sought an endorsement from homegrown Irish talent, the playwright and well-known alcoholic, Brendan Behan, but the best he could come up with was ‘Guinness makes you drunk.’ (If only all ad campaigns were so honest!) However, this story is unverified and Guinness have denied that they ever sought a slogan from Behan. Advertising is the very essence of democracy. – Anton Chekhov Another writer to lend his services to the advertising industry was F. Scott Fitzgerald, more famous as the author of The Great Gatsby and ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’. He wrote the slogan ‘We keep you clean in Muscatine’ for a local steam laundry company. Other writers who cut their teeth on advertising include Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22.

If Marshall McLuhan was right and advertising is a great art form, then it raises the question of the relationship between literature and advertising. Can literary talent be honed by a spell working in the world of Mad Men? Share this: Asian American Writers' Workshop - Six Things to Know About Salman Rushdie About Six Things to Know About Salman Rushdie Lesser known facts about the celebrated author—from his days sweating ad copy to his latest gig as a television screenwriter Salman Rushdie, left, playing Helen Hunt's gynecologist in the 2007 film Then She Found Me By AAWW May 3, 2013 | Amitava Kumar , fun facts , Jonathan Safran Foer , Lifetime Achievement Award , lists , Téa Obreht , trivia , Zadie Smith Media Gallery When, on February 14, 1989, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, sentencing the writer to death for “insulting” Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s first reaction, which he recalls in his recently published memoir Joseph Anton, was to run to the window, close his curtains, and lock his front door.

The author went into hiding for the following nine years. In the 656-page memoir, written in the third person, Rushdie reveals an enormous amount of detail about how exactly he survived his years in exile. The sheer number of stories compelled us to dig up a few more. Here are a few things we learned about Rushdie’e life, from his early days before becoming a novelist to his latest, yet to be unveiled project. On Monday, May 6, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Téa Obreht, and Amitava Kumar come together with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to honor Salman Rushdie with a lifetime achievement award. For tickets and more information, click here . 1. Rushdie was once a champion of fresh cream cakes In the 1970s, after one of his theater pals in the UK landed a gig writing ad copy for lucrative shampoo commercials and used the money to buy a sports car, Salman Rushdie was compelled to try his hand as a copywriter.

In a speech made before the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, he remembers being asked during his first copywriting test to “imagine that you met a Martian who mysteriously spoke English and you had to explain to them in less than 100 words how to make toast.” He failed the test. Later, while working at the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, he coined the slogan for Fresh Cream Cakes: “Naughty, but Nice.” A couple others lines he’s responsible for include “That’ll do nicely” for American Express and “Irresistibubble” for the effervescent candy-bar Aero. Although his stint in advertising came a full decade before he became a full-time author, Rushdie managed to write his Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children on the job. A mid-1980s TV ad for Fresh Cream Cakes, whose slogan Rushdie coined in the ’70s 2. He was off to see the wizard at an early age When Rushdie was 9 or 10 years old, he was inspired to write a short story after watching the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

The story he crafted was about a boy in Bombay who climbs up a rainbow and has “fairy tale adventures.” In a 1992 New Yorker piece titled ‘Out of Kansas’ he writes that the song “‘Over the Rainbow’ is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where ‘the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.’ It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.” He calls The Wizard of Oz his “very first literary influence.” 3. Rushdie jumped at the chance to play himself on the big screen Well before he struck up a deal with Deepa Mehta to adapt Midnight’s Children to film, Rushdie had made his way onto the big screen a handful of times. He had a brief cameo in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. His friend Helen Fielding, whose book was adapted into the British rom-com film, offered Rushdie the opportunity to play himself in the movie witnessing an awkward speech at the launch of a book titled Kafka’s Moterbike. He took the offer.

A few years later, he played Helen Hunt’s gynecologist in the 2007 film Then She Found Me. Rushdie had been interested in acting for years—he was involved in theater during his college years and then in London on the Fringe before he switched to copywriting. Spot Rushdie’s cameo performance in Bridget Jones’s Diary, during the book launch for Kafka’s Moterbike. One of Rushdie’s journals from his complete archive at Emory University | credit: Kay Hinton 4. His hard drive is now in the cloud Rushdie’s complete archive is housed at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, where his private journals, notebooks, photographs, manuscripts, a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops—one of which Rushdie spilled diet coke on—and an external hard drive are all open to view by the public. It’s one of the first interactive “born-digital” archives in the US, in which many of the materials being preserved originated in digital format. After the fatwa, Rushdie began working exclusively on computers, and so everything from virtual Post-it notes to early drafts of novels are only available digitally.

Viewers of the archive can even log-in to one of Rushdie’s computers and start editing a manuscript. 5. He’ll write you a book for your birthday—but only if you’re his son The stories in Rushdie’s magical realist children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories were first imagined at the bedside of his eldest son Zafar in the late 1980s, while Rushdie was writing The Satanic Verses. Zafar, then nine, had suggested that his father write stories for children, and so he turned the tales featuring a boy named Haroun, Zafar’s middle name, into a book written for his son upon his 11th birthday, and published soon after the fatwa was declared. Twenty years later, Rushdie’s younger son, Milan, demanded a book. And so for Milan’s 13th birthday, Rushdie followed suit and wrote the sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a novel featuring a boy with Milan’s middle name: Luka and the Fire of Life. 6. Rushdie’s got his eye on writing for the small screen Rushdie is now writing scripts for a Showtime sci-fi television series called The Next People.

He described it as a kind of “paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people.” When talking about the move to TV scriptwriting, he told reporters, “In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee… In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.” AAWW Advertising | Interesting Literature Interesting Literature Posted by interestingliterature Before he wrote Midnight’s Children – the 1981 novel which would win not only the Booker Prize for that year but the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award in 1993 – Salman Rushdie worked in advertising. It was during this period in the 1970s that Rushdie came up with several classic advertising slogans: ‘Naughty but nice’ (to advertise cream cakes), ‘That’ll do nicely’ (for American Express credit cards), and ‘Irresistibubble’ (for Aero chocolate bars). He also came up with this, for the Daily Mirror: ‘Look into the Mirror tomorrow – you’ll like what you see.’ Rushdie has said that his work in advertising ‘taught me to write like a job.

If you have the client coming in that afternoon for his new campaign, you can’t not have it. You have to have it. What’s more, it has to be good.’ George Orwell may have described advertising as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’ in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), a book which shows a man with high literary ambitions being ‘reduced’ to the work of writing advertising jingles and rhymes. But Marshall McLuhan described it as ‘the greatest art form of the twentieth century’. And certainly, many popular and celebrated writers of the twentieth century and beyond have put their mark on this modern art form. Rushdie is one name among many. The author of The Satanic Verses had actually failed the initial test he took for J. Walter Thompson, a leading advertising company (which was run by none other than the thriller writer, James Patterson). But he persevered, spurred on by a friend’s assurance that it was ‘really easy’. Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

– Mark Twain Fay Weldon, author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), is another novelist who started out in the field of advertising. In this connection she is probably most famous for writing the slogan ‘Go to work on an egg’, in support of a large advertising campaign in Britain in the 1950s supported by the Egg Marketing Board. But Weldon didn’t in fact write the slogan: it was ‘hatched’ (sorry, we couldn’t resist) by someone else, and Weldon merely helped to popularise the slogan (we say ‘merely’, but at the time Weldon occupied the senior role of Head of Copywriting and she was instrumental in making the phrase known in households up and down the country). One slogan which Weldon did write was ‘Vodka gets you drunker quicker.’ This was never used, though, as it was rejected by her bosses. (And this at a time before drink awareness was as high as it is now!) While we’re talking drink, it was Dorothy L.

Sayers, crime writer and creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who originated several Guinness slogans used in the 1920s, such as (reputedly) ‘Guinness is good for you.’ (She used her experience working in advertising for the 1933 Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Murder Must Advertise.) One legend has it that the brewery had initially sought an endorsement from homegrown Irish talent, the playwright and well-known alcoholic, Brendan Behan, but the best he could come up with was ‘Guinness makes you drunk.’ (If only all ad campaigns were so honest!) However, this story is unverified and Guinness have denied that they ever sought a slogan from Behan. Advertising is the very essence of democracy. – Anton Chekhov Another writer to lend his services to the advertising industry was F. Scott Fitzgerald, more famous as the author of The Great Gatsby and ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’. He wrote the slogan ‘We keep you clean in Muscatine’ for a local steam laundry company. Other writers who cut their teeth on advertising include Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22.

If Marshall McLuhan was right and advertising is a great art form, then it raises the question of the relationship between literature and advertising. Can literary talent be honed by a spell working in the world of Mad Men? Moor's Last Sigh (Rushdie) - LitLovers Moor's Last Sigh (Rushdie) ISBN-13: 9780679744665 Summary Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

(From the publisher.) Author Bio • Education—M.A., King's College, Cambridge, UK • Awards—Booker Prize, 1981 (named the best novel to win the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years in 1993); Whitbread Prize, 1988 and 1995 • Currently—lives in New York, New York Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989.

Rushdie was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at the Emory University and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy. Career Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer.

John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads...admittedly." His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years. Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, the author has refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating... People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you.

In that sense, I’ve never felt that I’ve written an autobiographical character. After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame, in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Indian diaspora. Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called The Jaguar Smile. This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments. His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990. Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats. His latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life, published in November 2010.

Earlier in the same year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs, entitled Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which was published in September 2012. In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack (a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks) when he published his short story "In the South" on the platform. Other Activities Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general. He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours. Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival. He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers.

In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives. In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances). Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On May 12, 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me.

In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher. Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be released in October, 2012. Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Satanic Verses and the fatwa The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities. On February 14, 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam." A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years.

On March 7, 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy. The publication of the book and the fatwa sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked and even killed. On September 24, 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie." Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the death sentence. In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid. Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwa on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it, and the person who issued it – Ayatollah Khomeini – has been dead since 1989.

Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat." A memoir of his years of hiding, Joseph Anton, was published in 2012. Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias. In 2012, following uprisings over an anonymously posted YouTube video denigrating Muslims, a semi-official religious foundation in Iran increased the reward it had offered for the killing of Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million dollars. Their stated reason: "If the [1989] fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have continued would have not happened." Knighthood Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on June 16, 2007.

He remarked, "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie. Al-Qaeda has condemned the Rushdie honour. The Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that Britain's award for Indian-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response." Religious Beliefs Rushdie came from a Muslim family though he is an atheist now. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending". Personal Life Rushdie has been married four times.

He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980). His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1999). In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on July 2, 2007, with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage. In 1999 Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids and that, according to him, was making it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all," he said.

Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia.) Book Reviews I was raised neither a Catholic nor a Jew. I was both and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was—what's the word these days? atomized. Yessir: a real Bombay mix." So says Moraes Zogioby, known as Moor, the narrator of The Moor's Last Sigh. Salman Rushdie's first novel in seven years is his best work since 1980's brilliant Midnight's Children. Moor, who has a disorder that causes him to age at twice the normal speed, is the last surviving member of a crazy clan of wealthy South Indian spice merchants. He tells their insane, incestuous, violent domestic saga, which spans four generations. It centers on his beautiful mother, Aurora da Gama, a stubborn, passionate, Christian artist who, at 15, falls in love with the handsome Abraham Zogioby, a penniless, 35-year-old Jewish employee of her family.

They marry and have four children: Ina, Minnie, Mynah and Moor. Betrayal, murder, and mayhem ensue. Rushdie, the author of nine previous books—including The Satanic Verses, which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue his death sentence in 1989—alludes often to his own exile, the story of modern India and the dangers of art. At first the hyperbole, didactic asides, verbal puns, lyrical and lewd jokes, and slapstick routines seem a bit much, but if you stick with it, a cumulative magic takes hold. Rushdie's satiric, hysterically funny, political family tragedy is a masterpiece. Susan Shapiro - Salon This novel, looked at as a work of literary art, is a triumph, an intricate and deceptive one.... The grand deception in this book is to conceal a bitter cautionary tale within bright, carnivalesque wrappings. Norman Rush - New York Times The most complete and gratifying work to emerge from Salman Rushdie's imagination.... The Moor's Last Sigh is an exotic story, in its setting, in its characters, in its punning extravagance, and in its deeply human core.

It is an extraordinary family saga...full of wonderful characters, and the insight born of genuine reflection.... A remarkable spell of creativity. Edmonton Journal One of the most wonderful works of political art I have encountered, a novel to rival Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, or Dante's Divine Comedy.... The Moor's Last Sigh is one of the most admirable novels I've ever read. Ottawa Citizen Moraes Zogoiby, the product of a mixed marriage, is a self-described "cathjew nut" living in the multicultural stewpot of Bombay. His freethinking mother, Aurora, heiress to a vast spice trade fortune and reputedly a descendant of Vasco da Gama, decorates his nursery with murals featuring American cartoon characters instead of the traditional Hindu deities. Young Moraes's cultural identity is so confused that his favorite Indian is Tonto, from The Lone Ranger. Aurora is also a renowned artist, and the book's title refers to her masterpiece, which has been stolen by a rival and smuggled out of the country. Moraes's frantic search for the painting is complicated by the fact that he ages at twice the normal speed and is quickly running out of time.

This rich and very readable novel is filled with playful allusions to postwar Indian history, world literature, pop culture, and Rushdie's own recent travails. On a par with the marvelous Midnight's Children, this is Rushdie's best work in years. —Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Library Journal Discussion Questions 1. Why does Rushdie use the device of a "double-quick" [p. 143] life for the Moor? What does the idea of such speed add to the novel? What is the significance of the Moor's deformed right hand to his character and function within the story? 2. Rushdie has stated that the idea of a portrait of a mother painted over because the father did not like it—the "lost image"—was the original inspiration for this novel. The image of the "palimpsest, " a painting over which a second work has been superimposed, is central to The Moor's Last Sigh. How does the palimpsest become a metaphor for other of the novel's themes, i. e., love, God, the cultures of India? 3. Would you call Aurora a "good" mother?

How directly is she responsible for the tragic lives of Ina, Minnie, Mynah, and the Moor? Why did Vasco Miranda paint Aurora without her children, and how does that image correspond with the picture of India painted by Rushdie? 4. Aurora's role as a mother is clearly central, but what about her role as wife and lover? What strategies does she use to deal with the men in her life, in particular Abraham, Vasco, and Raman Fielding? What do the notions of love, fidelity, and infidelity mean to her? 5. "Motherness—excuse me if I underline the point—is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet" [p. 137]. In India, the mother is traditionally associated with the idea of the nation. How does Rushdie use the mythology of the mother goddess to depict his country? How did Indira Gandhi use it to propagandize her own national role, and what do you infer Rushdie's opinion of such mythmaking to be? How is Auroramade to represent the Indian nation itself in its maternal role? 6.

What do the key historical events referred to by the narrator—the Spanish reconquista of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, the founding of the spice trade between Europe and India, Portuguese colonial expansion, political events of twentieth-century India—have to do with the story of the Zogoiby and da Gama families? How do these references contribute to the story's impact? 7. "The family in the novel reflects a truth about Bombay society in the past thirty or so years, " Rushdie has said. "Which is that the rich have got very much richer and the poor very much poorer." How is this economic disparity dealt with in the novel? How do the changing fortunes of the da Gama-Zogoiby clan reflect the economic condition of India? Can you find parallels with the changes that have taken place in American society over the past twenty years? 8. Do you think that Rushdie's elegiac representation of Bombay owes something to his exile from his native city? Where else in the novel does the theme of exile arise? Which characters might be considered, at one time or another, exiles? 9. How does Rushdie depict Hinduism? How does Raman Fielding's Mumbai Axis distort the tenets of Hinduism [pp.

296-301], and to what purpose? Is his political/cultural agenda pure fascism, and how closely does it resemble the most famous fascist regime of the century, Adolf Hitler's? Are the Moor's reasons for joining Fielding convincing to you? Does Rushdie imply that religious fundamentalism is essentially inimical to democracy? Do you believe that Rushdie implies a link between religion and madness? Between religion and disease? 10. Rushdie has given his characters names that are resonant within Portuguese, Spanish, Jewish, and Indian culture: Abraham, Carmen, Camoens, da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, Isabella, Vasco, Adam Braganza, Castile, etc. What significance does each name carry within the narrative and within the thematic structure Rushdie has given his novel? 11. Over and over Rushdie stresses, through his narrator the Moor, the beauty of plurality. Speaking of his family's history, the Moor asks, "Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crownsÉcan this really be India?" [p. 87].

How does the narrator represent, in his own person, India's pluralism and the pluralism of the entire world? How does the golden age of Granada, as imagined by Aurora in her paintings, comment upon the Zogoibys' story and the political history of the late twentieth century? Is Aurora's vision confirmed or denied by the novel's events? 12. How do the changes and developments in Aurora's painting style comment upon the nature and function of the artist? What about her evolving subject matter—how does it reflect the events within her family, and the larger events occurring in the nation and the world? How does Vasco Miranda's second-rate, kitsch art contradict, or compliment, Aurora's vision? 13. Uma Sarasvati's is presented by the author and by Aurora herself as a foil to Aurora. Does her character—and the more theoretical, "post-modern" nature of her art [pp. 261-2]—function as the opposite of Aurora's, or as its compliment? Does Uma exist as a character in her own right, or purely as an incarnation of evil? Is Abraham, too, an incarnation of evil? 14.

What does Rushdie imply about the position and role of women through female characters such as Aurora, Belle, Uma, Carmen, and Nadia Wadia, and what, if anything, do these women have in common? How do they use the force of their characters to redress any cultural disadvantages they might have as women? How might one describe Rushdie's vision of the balance between the sexes? 15. In his opening pages, the Moor presents himself as a variation on Dante, "without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life" [p. 4], and the structure of the book is guided in part by that of The Divine Comedy. What other works of literature—fairy tales, religious texts, mythologies, epics, plays—help to give The Moor's Last Sigh its shape? How do their themes contribute to and enrich Rushdie's own? 16. How does Rushdie use the Benengeli section of the novel to explore the theme of parasitism, and do you think that he intends Benengeli to represent the parasitism of the modern world?

Rushdie equates Vasco Miranda with Bram Stoker's Dracula; with Helsing, the Larios sisters, and the Benengeli Parasites he makes other references to the Dracula tale. What does he achieve by making this comparison? What does the presence of Aoi U' within Vasco's nightmarish castle signify? 17. The Moor's Last Sigh can be seen as an argument for tolerance over dogmatism, educated scepticism over intractible zeal. How does Rushdie's imagined ideal of "Mooristan" encapsulate this interpretation? Do you believe that the novel delivers a message of pessimism or of optimism? (Questions issued by publisher.) These 10 Famous Authors Had Regular Day Jobs! - OfficeChai These 10 Famous Authors Had Regular Day Jobs! Posted on by OfficeChai Team Planning to write a book, but the job coming in the way? Let the pros show you how. Long before they became the world class raconteurs we know them to be, and had all the success, fame and money, these authors had normal day jobs to support themselves. As they say art imitates life, many of their writings and incidents in the books were inspired by their jobs.

While most authors left their jobs after becoming successful authors, some of them even kept the jobs along with their publishing career. In no particular order here’s a list of some famous authors, and their jobs. 1. Arthur Conan Doyle image: Telegraph UK Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is known all over the world as the creator of one of the most famous fictional characters in English literature, the master detective Sherlock Holmes, but he was much more than the originator of modern detective literature. He was a man of many talents and pursuits: a medical doctor, multi-talented sportsman, prolific and excellent storyteller, keen patriot and a staunch imperialist, as well as a campaigner against miscarriages of justice. Having studied medicine, he worked as a medical assistant, as a ship’s surgeon, did an opthalmagoy course in Germany and opened an eye clinic back in London. However, as he wrote in his Memories and Adventures, “not one single patient had entered the threshold of my room.” Having no patients he had plenty of time to reconsider his career, and eventually, he decided to undergo a significant metamorphosis from doctor to writer. 2.

Charles Dickens image: NPR Long before his well-documented work as a freelance journalist and legal clerk in a London law office (a job which later inspired the unsolvable court case at the center of Bleak House), a 12-year-old Charles Dickens worked in a factory pasting labels onto pots of boot polish. Working 10 hours a day, Dickens earned a weekly wage of six shillings — equivalent to around $25/£16 today. He later recalled how he had worked alongside “two or three other boys who were kept at similar duty downstairs on similar wages”, one of whom had shown him around on his first day in the job. “His name was Bob Fagin,” Dickens later told his friend and biographer John Forster, “and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards.” 3. Agatha Christie image source When the UK declared war on Germany in 1914, Agatha Christie quickly joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment and spent the next four years attending injured troops at a military hospital in Torquay, Devon.

Following two years of unpaid work, in 1917 Christie qualified as an apothecaries’ assistant and received an annual wage of £16 (equivalent to around $1300/£800 today) until the end of the War. She later drew on her knowledge of pharmaceuticals in many of her novels, the first of which, Hercule Poirot’s Mysterious Affair At Styles, was published in America in 1920, and in the UK in 1921. 4. Harper Lee image source Having dropped out of a law degree at the University of Alabama, a 23-year-old Harper Lee moved to New York in 1949 hoping to pursue a career as a writer. To pay her way she worked as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and BOAC (the precursor to British Airways), writing various articles and short stories in her spare time.

In 1956, the Broadway lyricist and composer Michael Brown, whom Lee had met through her childhood friend Truman Capote, gave her one year’s wages as a Christmas present, along with a note reading, “You have one year off to write whatever you please.” A year later, she handed her agent the first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird. 5. James Joyce image source After abandoning a medical degree, working as a singer and a pianist, and teaching English in Croatia and Italy, in December 1909 James Joyce and his long-term partner (and eventual wife) Nora Barnacle returned to Ireland to open Dublin’s first cinema, The Volta. The business collapsed the following year when Joyce returned to his teaching on the continent, but continued writing short fiction in his spare time. After several years of revisions and struggling to find a publisher, his first major work,Dubliners, was published in 1914. 6. Robert Frost The American poet and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost dropped out of his Ivy League education at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, after two months and returned home to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he took a job as a teacher and classroom assistant.

He was working in a light-bulb filament factory when he sold his first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” in 1894. 7. Salman Rushdie image source Rushdie’s first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with “irresistibubble” for Aero and “Naughty but Nice” for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line “That’ll do nicely” for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote the Booker prize winning Midnight’s Children, before becoming a full-time writer. 8. Joseph Heller image source After graduating from high school in 1941, Joseph Heller worked as a blacksmith’s apprentice before enlisting in the US Army Air Corps the following year. After the war, he returned to study English at the University of Southern California, and in 1949 received an MA from Columbia University. Over the next decade he taught composition, fiction and dramatic writing at various schools and colleges across the country, before taking a job at an advertising agency and writing in his spare time.

He wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 in one week in 1953, but took another eight years for him to finish the entire book. 9. John Green image source Before he was a bestselling author, he worked as a children’s hospital chaplain. Green has said that he wasn’t a very good chaplain. He intended to become an Episcopal priest, but his experiences of working in a hospital with children suffering from life-threatening illnesses inspired him to become an author, and later to writeThe Fault in Our Stars. 10. JK Rowling image source Hard to tell that the creator of the highest books in the history and one of the richest women in the world today has had a humble upbringing, has dealth with unemployement and has held teaching and research jobs for years before her big success. After the position of Head Girl at Wyedean School and College, JK Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with a BA in French and Classics, and then worked as a researcher for Amnesty International. While she’d begun work on Harry Potter, she also went to Portugal and taught in universities.

(List partially inspired by the post by Huffington Post) Recommended Reads: Jusubooks clc author collection - Salman Rushdie - Education Jusubooks clc author collection - Salman Rushdie Jusubooks clc author collection - Salman Rushdie May 12, 2015 Share Jusubooks clc author collection - Salman Rushdie Embed <iframe src="" width="750" height="600" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px; margin-bottom:5px; max-width: 100%;" allowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="" title="Jusubooks clc author collection - Salman Rushdie" target="_blank">Jusubooks clc author collection - Salman Rushdie</a></div> size(px) Report Description Keep clicking to know more about Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honors. Text 1. 2. Keep clicking to know more about Salman Rushdie… 3.

Birth, Early Life & Career: Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, born on 19 June 1947. He is a British Indian novelist and essayist. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a University of Cambridgeeducated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin Bhatt, a teacher, Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent. Rushdie has three sisters. He wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes. He was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, Rugby School, and King's College, University of Cambridge, where he studied history.Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer. 4.

1975: GRIMUS Grimus is a 1975 fantasy and science fiction novel. It was Rushdie’s literary debut. The story loosely follows Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift of immortality after drinking a magic fluid. After drinking the fluid, Flapping Eagle wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days, searching for his immortal sister and exploring identities before falling through a hole in the Mediterranean Sea. He arrives in a parallel dimension at the mystical Calf Island where those immortals who have tired of the world but are reluctant to give up their immortality exist in a static community under a subtle and sinister authority.Rent it from JustBooks 5. 1976: First Marriage. Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980). 6. 1980: MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN Midnight's Children deals with India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India. It is considered an example of postcolonial literature and magical realism.

The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events as with historical fiction.It won both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in. It was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's survey The Big Read.It was also added to the list of Great Books of the 20th Century, published Rent it from JustBooks by Penguin Books. 7. 1983 : SHAMERent it from JustBooksShame is Rushdie's third novel, published in 1983. Like most of Rushdie's work, this book was written in the style of magic realism. It portrays the lives of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Iskander Harappa) and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (General Raza Hyder) and their relationship. The central theme of the novel is that violence is born out of shame.

The concepts of 'shame' and 'shamelessness' are explored through all of the characters, with main focus on Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyám. Shame discusses heritage, authenticity, truth, and, of course, shame and shamelessness, as well as the impact of all these themes on an individual, the protagonist Omar Khayyám. 8. 1987: THE JAGUAR SMILE: A NICARAGUAN JOURNEY In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and warrior-poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous range of people, from the foreign minister to the midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room.

His perceptions always heightened by his sensitivity and his unique flair for language, in The Jaguar Smile,he brings us the true Nicaragua, where nothing is simple, everything is contested, and life&death struggles are Rent it from JustBooks an everyday occurrence. 9. 1988: Second Marriage His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. They were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993 10. 3 August 1989: Failed assassination attempt and Hezbollah's comments While Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh was priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosive in a hotel in Paddington, Central London, the bomb exploded prematurely, destroying two floors of the hotel and killing Mazeh. A previously unknown Lebanese group, the Organization of the Mujahidin of Islam, said he died preparing an attack "on the apostate Rushdie James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation testified before the United States Congress that a "March 1989“ explosion in Britain was a Hezbollah attempt to assassinate Rushdie that failed when a bomb exploded prematurely, killing a Hezbollah terrorist in London. 11.

1990: HAROUN & THE SEA OF STORIES In A Sad City, The Saddest Of Cities, A City So Ruinously Sad That It Had Forgotten Its Name, Lived A Professional Storyteller Named Rashid And His Son Haroun.' Thus Begins Rushdie & Rsquo;S Magical And Delightful Book, Which Is Comprised Of Hundreds Of Stories, Funny And Sad, All Of Them Juggled At Once, Together With Sorcery And Love, Wicked Uncles And Fat Aunts, And Mustachioed Gangsters In Yellow Check Pants.Rent it from JustBooks 12. 1992: IMAGINARY HOMELANDS Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of his remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-twentieth century race, religion and politics.

Elsewhere he trains his eye on literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on love to the politics of George Orwell's 'Inside the Whale', providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Raymond Rent it from JustBooks Carver, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon among others. 13. 1994: EAST, WEST From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Satanic Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical and humane, this book renews Rushdie's stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence.Rent it from JustBooks 14. 1995: THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH Moares 'Moor' Zogoiby is a 'high-born crossbreed', the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinise spice merchants and crime lords. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile.

As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a labyrinthine tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. The Moor's Last Sigh is a spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical and compassionate novel. It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.Rent it from JustBooks 15. 1997: Third Marriage His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1999). 16. 1999: THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET It is a variation on the Orpheus myth with rock music replacing Orpheus' lyre. The myth works as a red thread from which the author sometimes strays, but to which he attaches an endless series of references.

The book, while at its core detailing the love of two men, Ormus and Umeed, for the same woman, Vina, provides a background and alternate history to the entire 1950s-1990s period of the growth of rock music. The minor characters of the story are particularly interesting, as they provide the most vivid portraits of the cultures and backgrounds that come into play in the story.Rent it from JustBooks 17. 2001: FURY Fury opens on a New York living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees to New York. There is a fury within him, and he fears that he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. But fury is all around him. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him.

Meanwhile, his own thoughts, emotions and desires are also running wild. Rent it from JustBooks A young woman in a D'Angelo baseball cap is in .store. 18. In 2004, he married the Indian American Padma Lakshmi, an actress, model, and host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on 2 July 2007, with Lakshmi's indicating it was her desire to end it. 19. 2005: SHALIMAR THE CLOWN Shalimar the Clown has attracted significant attention, comparable to his earlier publications, particularly The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children. Shalimar the Clown derives its name from Shalimar Gardens, in the vicinity of Srinagar, one of several Mughal Gardens, which were laid out in several parts of undivided India when the Mughals reigned over the subcontinent. Shalimar is the name of one of the characters featured in the novel.Rent it from JustBooks 20. 16 June 2007 : Rushdie was knighted Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours .

In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Parliamentarians of several of these countries condemned the action, and Iran and Pakistan called in their British envoys to protest formally. Controversial condemnation issued by Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Ijazul-Haq was in turn rebuffed by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Ironically, their respective fathers Zia-ul-Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been earlier portrayed in Rushdie's novel Shame. Mass demonstrations against Rushdie's knighthood took place in Pakistan and Malaysia. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie. 21. 2008: THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery, attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world.

It is the story of two cities at the height of their powers–the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. Profoundly moving and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s Rent it from JustBooks most important living writers. 22. 2010: LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE On a beautiful starry night in the city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay a terrible thing happened: twelve-yearold Lukas storyteller father, Rashid, fell suddenly and inexplicably into a sleep so deep that nothing and no one could rouse him.

To save him from slipping away entirely, Luka must embark on a journey through the Magic World, encountering a slew of phantasmagorical obstacles along the way, to steal the Fire of Life, a seemingly impossible and exceedingly dangerous task.With Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie proved that he is one of the best contemporary writers of fables, and it proved to be one of his most popular books with readers of all ages.Rent it from JustBooks 23. 2012: JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.”So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by.

He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov 24. How it works at JustBooks… RentReadReturn 25. To Know more:Click here 26. Unlimited Membership Plans… -One membership for entire family 27. Avid+ RegularRs.4750/Year2 Books at a time Refundable Deposit Rs.10003 Books at a time4 Books at a time 2 Magazines at a timeRefundable Deposit Rs.1000No Registration Fee No Refundable DepositSignupSignupSignupBasic Rs.250/MonthRs.300/Month 28. Email: info@justbooksclc.com / blog.justbooksclc.com

Question: Which Booker prize winning writer wrote the slogan “That’ll do nicely” for American Express?
Answer: SALMAN RUSHDIE