Review: Salman Rushdie still at top of his powers with ‘Eleventh Hour’

Call him a master wordsmith, formal innovator, Booker prize winner, Nobel laureate-in-waiting, a sorcerer. Call him Sir Salman Rushdie.

He slips into a story as gracefully as Laurence Olivier vanished into a Shakespearean role. Rushdie’s towering talent is evident throughout “The Eleventh Hour,” a quintet of tales that are his follow-up to “Knife,” a searing memoir of his near-fatal 2022 stabbing. Here, his fiction blends the real with the fable-like. No Anglophone writer does it better.