Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Life—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction: Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line, and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of American PEN, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature. His forthcoming novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, is a multifaceted work that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story to bring alive a world that has been plunged into an age of unreason.
Michael Krasny is the host of the KQED radio program Forum. He is a professor of English at San Francisco State University and the author of Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest and Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life. His many stage interviews include Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates and Brian Greene.