Salman Rushdie isn’t high up on my list of favorite novelists. I tried to read The Satanic Verses out of curiosity once but gave up after a couple of inscrutable chapters. I made it deeper into Midnight’s Children, but I didn’t connect with that book either and never finished it. What interests me more than Rushdie’s tales of magical realism are the stranger-than-fiction plot points of his life. I still remember reading a riveting excerpt in The New Yorker from his 2012 memoi

I’m back after a summer break that included an unforgettable trip to the Alps, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Before my vacation, I had been looking for a book to help set the scene for me but found it surprisingly hard to find the right one. During the early days of the pandemic, I read Thomas Mann’s early 20th-century novel The Magic Mountain, set in an isolated Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium where the Alps represent a dreamlike escape from reality. It’s a

Last weekend, I traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas for the first time. One highlight was visiting the place where, in 1957, a group of brave Black teenagers attempted to walk through the doors of the all-white Central High School, surrounded by mobs of enraged segregationists. These students, known as the Little Rock Nine, became enduring symbols of the civil rights movement. Little Rock Central High School, now a national historic site run by the National Park Service, remain