A Night with Salman Rushdie

June 17 5:00 pm

Live Streamed via Crowdcast

Get Tickets

A Night with Salman Rushdie

June 17 5:00 pm
Live Streamed via Crowdcast
Get Tickets

About the Event

Presented in partnership with BMI, Literary Arts, and The Loft’s WordPlay, and the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

About Presenter Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdieis the author of thirteen previous novels—GrimusMidnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), ShameThe Satanic VersesHaroun and the Sea of StoriesThe Moor’s Last SighThe Ground Beneath Her FeetFuryShalimar the ClownThe Enchantress of FlorenceLuka and the Fire of LifeTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph AntonThe Jaguar SmileImaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited 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.