What occupies the mind of 78-year-old, Booker Prize– and Golden PEN Award– and fatwa-winning author Salman Rushdie these days is the unfinished story. The incomplete work, the unwritten line, the unlived life. His first work of fiction since he was stabbed 15 times by an Islamist in Chautauqua, N.Y., in 2022, deals with the unavoidable interruption. “The slow failing of the soft machine.”
The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories (Random House, 272 pp., $29) is bookended by two previously published shorts. Three new ones give it its central heft, its substance. “The Musician of Kahani” — she’s a supernatural talent born, of course, at midnight — is classic if weakened Rushdie. Then comes a ghost story: “When the Honorary Fellow S. M. Arthur woke up in his darkened College bedroom he was dead,” and he has plenty of work to do. Now we’re getting somewhere.
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