Book cover of Languages of Truth

Book description

Newly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction from the first two decades of the twenty-first century—including many texts never previously in print—by the Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Languages of Truth as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’ve always maintained that Rushdie is a better essayist than a novelist, and this book confirms my thinking.

He laments that readers crave more realism today, more “lived-experience,” even in fiction. Gone is the ability to let the imagination soar into the magical worlds of Haroun and Luca. “How autobiographical is it?” is a question he gets asked frequently. Thus, Roberto Bolano has usurped Gabriel Garcia Marquez with his auto-fiction novels. Yet, Rushdie admits that his most successful novel is Midnight’s Children, which is autobiographical, while his other autobiographical novel, Fury, bombed.

This is a great collection, loaded with anecdotes,…

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The Ballad of Falling Rock by Jordan Dotson,

Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…

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