Salman Rushdie’s Literary Inspirations

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Salman Rushdie prefers not to immerse himself in other people’s writing when he is working on his own. “When I’m writing fiction, I tend not to read fiction. I actually don’t want other people’s voices to sneak into my head,” Rushdie said recently. That’s not to say that other writers’ books aren’t an important part of his process—posing questions, providing instruction, and offering models of characters. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a handful of works that have offered guidance for his own writing, including a novella that appears in “ The Eleventh Hour ,” his la