Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven 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, and Luka and the Fire of Life 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 co-edited 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."
[Salman] Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story
within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible
delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has
lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril. . . . This book
is a fantasy, a fairytale and a brilliant reflection of and serious
meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world. .
. . I like to think how many readers are going to admire the
courage of this book, revel in its fierce colors, its
boisterousness, humor and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in
its generosity of spirit. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
Incandescent . . . brilliant, ambitious . . . Before the arrival of
his latest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,
Rushdie s stature as one of the major literary voices of our time
was already secure. And yet, in reading this new book, one cannot
escape the feeling that all those years of writing and success have
perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this
tremendously inventive and timely novel. San Francisco
Chronicle
A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the
tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns
was a matter of life and death. USA Today
In these nested, swirling tales, Rushdie conjures up a whole
universe of jinn slithering across time and space, meddling in
human affairs and copulating like they ve just been released from
twenty years in a lamp. . . .Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Nightstranslates the bloody upheavals of our last few
decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts
of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells. The
Washington Post
Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its
unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and
extraordinary range and layering of his voice. The Boston Globe
Courageous and liberating . . . a breathless mash-up of wormholes,
mythical creatures, current affairs and disquisitions on philosophy
and theology. The New York Times Book Review
This is Rushdie s first [novel] for adults since 2008, and he seems
to be having fun with the adult content. He works in jokes about
the sexual appetites of his jinn, brings alive dark corners of
Manhattan, explores misplaced love, and creates a good-versus-evil
battle that s firmly grounded in philosophy. . . .Two Years Eight
Months and Twenty-Eight Nightsis erudite without flaunting it, an
amusement park of a pulpy disaster novel that resists flying out of
control by being grounded by religion, history, culture and love.
Los Angeles Times
[A] rambunctious, satirical, and bewitching metaphysical fable,
perhaps his most thoroughly enjoyable to date. At once a scholar,
rigorous observer, and lavishly imaginative novelist, Rushdie
channels his well-informed despair over the brutality and absurdity
of human life into works of fantasy. . . . Rushdie is having
wickedly wise fun here. Every character has a keenly hilarious
backstory, and the action (flying carpets and urns, gigantic
attacking serpents, lightning strikes, to-the-death combat, sex)
surges from drastic and pulse-raising to exuberantly madcap,
magical, and genuinely emotional. . . . [A] fantastically
inventive, spirited, astute, and delectable update ofOne Thousand
and One Nights. Booklist(starred review)
A boisterous novel of ideas, a spirited manifesto for reason
disguised as a tale of a jinn war lasting exactly two years, eight
months and twenty-eight nights, or 1,001 nights . . . What results
is hallmark Rushdie: a composite of magic realism, mythology,
science fiction and straight-up fantasy. . . . Like the best
Rushdie novels, Two Years is playful and inventive, and also
intellectually bracing. The Globe and Mail
One of his very best books, one whose governing metaphor can be
about many terrible truths indeed . . . a sometimes archly elegant,
sometimes slightly goofy fairy tale with a character named Bento V.
Elfenbein, how could it be entirely serious? for grown-ups . . .
Beguiling and astonishing, wonderful and wondrous. Rushdie at his
best. Kirkus Reviews(starred review)
A comic novel about Medieval Islamic philosophy, fairies and the
near end of the world may sound difficult. Rushdie s brilliance is
in the balance between high art and pop culture. . . . This is a
novel of both intellectual heft and sheer reading pleasure a rare
feat. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There are monsters who slip through wormholes, or slits between
worlds; there are battles and set pieces, in Fairyland and on
Earth; there are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes hilarious comic
turns; stories within stories; riddles within tales within legends.
And there is Salman Rushdie, manic Scheherazade, assuming all the
voices, playing all the parts, making a mad kind of sense of it
all. Minneapolis Star Tribune
The title adds up to 1,001 nights, an allusion to the story of
Scheherazade, and although there are not 1,001 strands of story
here, there are many, and they are colourful and compelling. . . .
Rushdie displays the wry humour that helped make Midnight s
Children such a masterpiece. The Independent
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nightsis replete with
fantastical creatures, scary monsters, very bad men (or rather,
male jinns/genies) and one heroic woman. . . . While Rushdie has
written hyped up sagas of worlds colliding before, and always
espouses reason over fanaticism, there is something so loopy, so
unleashed, about this tale as to make it particularly thrilling.
New YorkDaily News
In his latest novel, Rushdie invents his own cultural narrative one
that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics,
and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books. . . . Referencing
Henry James, Mel Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Gracian, Bravo TV, and
Aristotle, among others, Rushdie provides readers with an
intellectual treasure chest cleverly disguised as a comic
pop-culture apocalyptic caprice. Publishers Weekly (starred
review)"
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