Step Across this Line

Description

The subjects of Salman Rushdie’s collection of non-fiction range from The Wizard of Oz, U2, India and Indian  writing, the death of Princess Diana and football, to twentieth-century writers including Angela Carter, Arthur Miller, Edward Said, J.M. Coetzee and Arundhati Roy. In a central section, ‘Messages from the Plague Years’,  Rushdie focuses on the fight against the Iranian fatwa, showing for the first time how it was to live through those days. Rushdie’s columns for the New York Times confront current issues — Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Islam and the West — as well as lighter topics such as reality TV, sport and sleaze. The book ends with the lectures that give it its title — Rushdie’s explorations of the theme of frontiers: crossing them, breaking taboos and, in the light of September II, the world of permeable frontiers in which we all live.