From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie comes a spellbinding exploration of life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life.
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Q&A with Tessa Hulls
Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life’s final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work—India, England, and America—and feature an unforgettable cast of characters.
“In the South” introduces a pair of quarrelsome old men—Junior and Senior—and their private tragedy at a moment of national calamity. In “The Musician of Kahani,” a musical prodigy from the Mumbai neighborhood featured in Midnight’s Children uses her magical gifts to wreak devastation on the wealthy family she marries into. In “Late,” the ghost of a Cambridge don enlists the help of a lonely student to enact revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. “Oklahoma” plunges a young writer into a web of deceit and lies as he tries to figure out whether his mentor killed himself or faked his own death. Lastly, “The Old Man in the Piazza” is a powerful parable for our times about freedom of speech.
Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? Do we spend our “eleventh hour” in serenity or in rage? And how do we achieve fulfillment with our lives if we don’t know the end of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
Salman Rushdie is the author of fifteen novels—Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor’s Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize); and Victory City—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published six works of nonfiction—The Jaguar Smile; Imaginary Homelands; Step Across This Line; Joseph Anton; Languages of Truth; and Knife (which was a finalist for the National Book Award)—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 America, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.
Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer illuminating the connections between the present and the past. As the mixed race daughter of two first generation immigrants who landed in a tiny town of 350 people, she grew up with no models of how she fit within American culture. Her family didn’t have TV and the internet didn’t yet exist, so she spent her formative years reading her way through the public library and roaming alone through the hills with a backpack full of books (she still does this). This fusion of solitude, research, and forward motion remains the bedrock of her extremely multidisciplinary creative practice.
Her graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book, the Libby Award (as in the beloved library app, as voted on by the nation’s librarians—which holds a special place in Tessa’s heart) for best graphic novel, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for memoir, which marks the first time in its 90-year history that the award has honored a graphic novel. Feeding Ghosts was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. In spite of all this, she is still completely sure she is never making another book.
