By Patrick Sullivan
Rage and ‘Fury’
IT WAS AMONG the smallest casualties of this month’s devastating terror, but it offered a special irony. Two days after the World Trade Center attack, Salman Rushdie was scheduled to appear at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses once earned him a death sentence from Iranian clerics, planned to read from Fury, his new novel about runaway rage in New York City. But like those of countless other airline passengers, Rushdie’s travel plans changed drastically. “We don’t really know if he’s going to reschedule, but he might,” explained one Book Passage employee. Meanwhile, Rushdie’s new book couldn’t seem more relevant: “Life is fury. Fury–sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal–drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths.”
Book Beat
THE EVENTS of that black Tuesday also cast a pall over the much-anticipated Sonoma County Book Fair in Santa Rosa. Many scheduled authors were unable to make it. But most events went ahead, including a crowd-pleasing reading by short-story master Roy Parvin.
From the September 20-26, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.
