"An enjoyable journey into the life, dreams and imperfections of a writer who straddles an uncomfortable position between the East and the West" - C21 Literature "This new book provides an in-depth study of all of Rushdie's published fiction, and it is enriched by Mishra's access to the voluminous Rushdie archive housed at Emory University. One learns about Rushdie's education, his literary enthusiasms, and the terrible drama that unfolded after the publication of Satanic Verses (1988)--the infamous fatwa that threatened his life during the ensuing ten years and changed the course of Rushdie's life and work. Throughout, the discussion is informed by literary theory, and figures as distant as Freud and Marx are referenced along with more contemporary thinkers such as Derrida and Edward Said. Most fascinating is the chapter on the archival holdings relevant to Rushdie's major work Midnight's Children (1981). Summing Up: Recommended." - CHOICE "At last: a properly researched, profoundly erudite book on Rushdie that gets the usual labels -- 'Indian', 'postcolonial', 'postmodern' -- off his back." -- Graham Huggan, Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, University of Leeds, UK "This far-reaching, stimulating study explores a rich array of new approaches to one of the most significant writers of our time, Salman Rushdie. The leading Rushdie scholar Vijay Mishra builds on exhaustive reading of the Emory Rushdie archive to uncover realist, modernist, postmodern, and magic realist as well as the more usual postcolonial approaches to the writer.

A must-read for all readers of Rushdie, this book has all the makings of a critical classic." -- Elleke Boehmer FEA, Professor of World Literature, University of Oxford, UK "Vijay Mishra's dedication to the Salman Rushdie archive represents a significant contribution to the study of the postcolonial novel. He is a meticulous reader of texts and pre-texts and therefore has a fine grasp of the of the intellectual histories and cultural lineages of the Rushdie oeuvre. The "finished" work is always renewed and refreshed by a study of the crucible of its making. Students of Rushdie's remarkable novels will profit from keeping company with Mishra's prolific insights." -- Homi K. Bhabha, Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, USA.