“In this elaborate, intellectual portrait of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire, Hugo von Hofmannsthal emerges as a man whose accomplishments and eloquence have left him utterly unprepared for the desolation of history. A meditation on the artist’s struggle to bring to life one’s own age, even as that age dissolves, and to make use of time as time makes use of us. A beautiful book.”
Adam Klein, author of The Medicine Burns and Tiny Ladies
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay. His allegorical novel about the birth of Indian independence, Midnight’s Children, won the 1981 Booker Prize. After his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, he became the subject of assassination attempts and a fatwa calling for his death, issued by Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini.
