Novelist Salman Rushdie at ‘The Eleventh Hour’ - Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

For more than three decades, author Salman Rushdie has lived under threat. In 1989, a fatwa forced him into hiding. In 2022, he was stabbed more than a dozen times while speaking on stage—and nearly killed.   Less than two years later, he recounted the attack (and remarkable recovery) in his memoir <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/738826/knife-by-salman-rushdie/">Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder</a>. Now, at seventy-eight, Rushdie returns to fiction with <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803572/the-eleventh-hour-by-salman-rushdie/">The Eleventh Hour</a>, a collection of five interlinked stories that explore anger, peace, mortality, and legacy.   We begin with the inspirations behind the new quintet (5:52), Rushdie’s formative, bookish years in Bombay (14:20), and the tumultuous family life that shaped his early writing (21:20). Then, he reflects on his time at Cambri...