Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Salman Rushdie.

His new novel is Fury, published by Random House.

Last week, we talked about some of the context,

personal, sociological, political,

psychological that inform the novel. But this week, I want to talk about the things that for me

make the book truly thrilling, which are issues about the imagination itself. It seems to me

that Fury is the kind of book that John Barth talked about when he talked about moving beyond comedy and tragedy into a realm that he calls mystery and apocalyptic farce.

And it seemed to me as well that the book is designed to make the reader's head kind of explode

as the context and layers multiply.

I hope so.

It's about somebody whose head is exploding in a way.

And it's nice to try and engender that feeling in the reader as well

because then they know what he's feeling.

But yeah, and I think I just followed a thread in this book.

I found myself with this image of this man

fleeing to New York, walking the city streets,

...