This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Salman Rushdie read his story, The Little King, from the July 29th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Rushdie has published 11 novels, including Midnight's Children,

The Satanic Verses, Two Years, Eight Months, and 28 Nights, and The Golden House.

His new novel, Kishut, from which this story was adapted, will be published in September.

Now here's Salman Rushdie. The Little King.

They once lived at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America,

a traveling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers,

who had developed an unwholesome because

entirely one-sided passion for a certain television personality, the beautiful, witty and

adored talk-show host, Miss Salma R, whom he had never met, an infatuation that he characterized

quite inaccurately as love.

In the name of this so-called love,

he christened himself Kishot for the opera Don Kishot and resolved to be his beloved's knight-errant,

to pursue her zealously right through the television screen

into whatever exalted high-definition reality

she and her kind

inhabited, and by deeds as well as by grace, to win her heart. The truth was that Kishat

had almost no friends anymore, no social group, no cohort, no posse, no real pals, having long

ago abandoned the social world.

On his Facebook page he had friended, or been friended by, a small and dwindling group of commercial

...