Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I suppose it's no surprise that the author

Solomon Rushdie has been thinking a lot about death. Yes, of course, there was the on-stage

stabbing attack that nearly killed him back in 2022. But even if that didn't happen, he'd still be a 78-year-old writer.

He is, as he himself puts it, not in the, quote, first flush of youth anymore.

And so his new book is a collection of short works gathered under the title The Eleventh Hour.

And there are different perspectives on looking at not just death, but the time leading up to it.

And in this interview with here and now Scott Tong, Rushdie brings up a point made by

the writer Edward Said, who said that some people respond to death with serenity and others

rage.

But for this book, Rushdie wondered, why not both?

That's after the break.

Free expression and courage and Salman Rushdie.

They kind of go together.

The generational fiction writer lived for decades under a death sentence and survived a recent stabbing attack.

Now Rushdie's pen triumphs over the sword, or in this case his attacker's knife,

as today he publishes his first

work of fiction since that attack three years ago. The 11th Hour is a collection of short

stories and novellos with his signature wit and magical realism. And just to catch you up,

Rushdie won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight's children.

His novel Satanic Verses came out in 1988, leading Iran's Ayatollah to declare it blasphemous and announced a death warrant for Rushdie, who went into hiding for years.

Now, after surviving the knife attack that took his right eye and the use of one arm,

Salman Rushdie joins us to talk about

...