On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was scheduled to give an author talk at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York. During his introduction, Rushdie was attacked onstage and stabbed multiple times, including in the eye, hand and chest. The surprising attack drew the spotlight back onto Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses caused Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwā in 1989 that called for the death of Rushdie.

This story has been covered by all of the major news outlets, but the news doesn’t inspect the reason we all know Salman Rushdie in the first place: his writing. In this episode, we’re looking at Salman Rushdie’s works and their relationship to the greater world of magical realism, a genre that every reader has encountered, often without knowing it. Though we’ve touched on magical realism during previous episodes of Booklovers, we’re more deeply inspecting the genre, its historical context, and the way readers expect to encounter it. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s role in Hobbs and Shaw is also discussed, primarily by Jess and Carmanita, as a modern day iteration of John Henry. Mr. The Rock, if you’re listening…