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From KQED. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrable. As a student, I loved Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children.

I loved that though it was serious literature, it didn't feel like a chore to read.

Yes, it dealt with partition and tragedy, but it also twinkled. It was storytelling.

And I have something of the same feeling about the 11th hour, Rusty's latest

collection of short stories and his first work of fiction after being stabbed at a speaking event in

2022. This book is serious, but not self-serious. It's about death, secrets, the aching loneliness

of those who outlive their families and peers.

But the people are still getting up to their hijinks.

The plots are still moving.

The little jokes and playful turns of phrase do not go away.

The characters in this book are actually living all the way until the end,

and even past that in some cases.

And the writer is still desperately in love with language. At a time when

so much modern fiction feels to me intentionally obscure or stuffily boxed in or dully

auto-fictional, it's a delight to read a master telling stories on the page with panache

and elegance playing with the idea of death like a matador. And he is with us this morning welcome to forum salmon rushie thanks for joining us thank you very nice to be on forum again yeah i know this must be your what fifth time it's been a lot yeah many yeah um can we start baldly provincially um this is a book rich with places, you know, from the English

University to Chennai to Long Island, and these places infuse their characters. When you come to San

Francisco or the Bay Area more broadly, like what do you notice? Like, what are we missing about this

...