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, it's my great good fortune to have Salman

Rushdie here to talk about his book, Shalamar the Clown. I wish it were possible to say that Alman Rushdie needs no introduction,

but he does need an introduction as an author, as a public figure, certainly his well-known,

but his novels are Shalimar the Clown, the most recent and in reverse order, Fury, the ground beneath her feet,

the Moor's Last Sigh, East West, a run in the Sea of Stories, the satanic verses, shame,

Midnight's Children, and Grimus.

I've been reading Midnight's Children again, which won The Booker of Bookers,

and to my enormous pleasure, I do think it's one of the

books that defines the last hundred years of reading. It's really a spectacular novel.

The new novel, Shalamar the Clown, I think is perhaps the best of his more recent books.

But it is as a chronicler that I wish to speak to Selman Rushdie.

This book seems to focus on Kashmir, which is your family's birthplace, and a place described as a paradise to the young woman we meet

in the first chapter who has never in fact been there but has learned to identify Kashmir with

paradise. What is it that makes Kashmir a paradise?

What is it that made it a paradise? Because I think you wouldn't, now it's a broken paradise.

I think it's something to do, first of all, with physical beauty. It's probably the most beautiful

place that anyone will ever see who goes there. I've certainly not

...