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  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407021379
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464

Step Across This Line




'Over the quick sprint of an essay, Rushdie dazzles and swoops' Financial Times

The subjects of Salman Rushdie's collection of non-fiction range from The Wizard of Oz, U2, India and Indian writing, the death of Princess Diana, and football, to twentieth-century writers including Angela Carter, Arthur Miller, Edward Said, J. M. Coetzee and Arundhati Roy.

In a central section, 'Messages from the Plague Years', Rushdie focuses on the fight against the Iranian fatwa, presenting texts both personal and political, which show for the first time how it was to live through those days. Rushdie's columns for the New York Times confront current issues - Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Islam and the West - as well as lighter topics such as reality TV, sport and sleaze. The book ends with the lectures that give it its title - Rushdie's exploration of the theme of frontiers: crossing them, breaking taboos, and - in the light of September 11 - the world of permeable frontiers in which we all live.

  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407021379
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464

About the author

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

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Praise for Step Across This Line

He has a great deal to say-a likeable, readable and profoundly gripping book

Scotland on Sunday

Rushdie has used all his experience and literary skills to defend what is most worth defending: our freedom to think, and say, and write what we want, without fear for our lives

Sunday Telegraph

Rushdie is the most assiduous reader of other people's work, a true and tireless man of literature...a total believer in the power of the word

Observer

Ten years of Salman Rushdie's incisive non-fiction

Independent

This impressive book limits itself to neither the light-hearted nor the undisturbably grave

Sunday Times