Rushdie, recipient of the 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award, honoring his commitment to public libraries and literature, discusses Joseph Anton, his provocative new memoir—a frank depiction of how he and his family lived with the threat of murder for nine years after being condemned for his writing, and how he struggled for the freedom of speech.
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven 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 three works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, and Step Across This Line, and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a former president of American PEN.
Louise Steinman is curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and Co-Director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: My Conversation With Poland (forthcoming). Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.
