Literature happens at the level of the sentence: Rushdie.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW YORK: The oral tradition of storytelling in India shaped his own approach to writing, said Salman Rushdie, speaking at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts series, in Manhattan, last week.
“A good story is one that makes you want to listen,” Rushdie said. “The art of telling a story is keeping an audience sitting there and from throwing things at you.”
He also remarked: “Literature happens at the level of the sentence.”
Rushdie took the state with author Teju Cole with host and Time Out New York contributing editor Matthew Love to discuss the components of a good story, only to make way for actors, including Blythe Danner and Jeffrey Wright, who read works by the authors which
Cole noted that the mark of a good story was the internal shift in the reader, reported the Guardian.
“The reader is one way when starting, and hopefully, quite another by the time the story is complete,” Cole noted.
Danner, who recently starred in The Country House, read Rushdie’s A Globe of Heaven, a short story where “art history meets science fiction”, as Rushdie noted in his introduction. The story was published by Rushdie to his now inactive Tumblr.
The story revolves around the perspective of Ava, a restorer of celestial globes, who encounters Maria Celestis, a woman who has tried to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life through her “discovery” of carved globes in the Mexican desert.
“It was an unusual experience,” Rushdie told the Guardian. “It was interesting to hear how the words sound in someone else’s voice.”
Zainab Jah, who was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Critic’s Circle award for her performance in the play Ruined, performed Cole’s Modern Girls, which he envisioned as a homage to his mother’s world in 1960s Nigeria, also dealing with issues of class and religion.
The evening also saw Michael Stuhlbarg, who was recently seen on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, reading Rushdie’s affecting story In the South, which was inspired by Rushdie encountering a rather cantankerous older man.
“For the story, I sliced him in two: now there are two cantankerous old men,” Rushdie explained.