WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 39writer has ranged over a variety of styles and subjects, such as the
code of honor underpinning Pakistani society in Shame and what
he describes as “the Eastern fabulist tradition” in his 2016 novel,
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
Rushdie takes another journey into unexplored territory in
Quichotte, which will be published by Random House in
September and was recently long-listed for the Booker. Inspired
by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the novel portrays an elderly travelingI
’ve always tried to do something I haven’t done before,
because I have a low boredom threshold,” Salman Rushdie
says while seated in the book-lined conference room at
the Wylie Agency. “There was certainly a point in my life
where I guess I could have written a version of Midnight’s
Children every two years and it would have been fine—except I
would have wanted to shoot myself!” Instead, in the 38 years since
his Booker-winning breakthrough novel was published, the“
Salman Rushdie
puts a playful spin
on Don Quixote in
his new novel,
Quichotte
BY WENDY SMITH
©^ rachel^
eli
za^
griffi
th
s