Join renowned storyteller Salman Rushdie for a literary conversation about his latest book Languages of Truth: Essays 2003–2020 on Tuesday, June 22 at 8 p.m. (EST). He will be live in conversation with author and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Nathan Englander.

Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of “truth,” revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism, and censorship.

Bringing together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches written between 2003 and 2020, Rushdie engages with a period of momentous cultural shifts, illuminating storytelling as a human need. Languages of Truth emerges, in myriad ways, as a love letter to literature itself.

Tickets cost $35 and include a copy of the book Languages of Truth (value $28). bit.ly/Rushdie22

Books can be picked up at Festival partner watchung booksellers in Montclair, or shipped to your home address (additional cost, select option when selecting ticket; shipping only available within the US). The book will be available for pick-up/delivery after publication on Tuesday, May 25, 2021. The event will be held online via Crowdcast and a registration link will be sent shortly after ticket purchase.

Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and The Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international best seller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, and most recently kaddish.com. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. His play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, premiered at the Public Theater in 2012. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

This event is a special event for Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival.

Any proceeds from the festival benefit parent organization, Montclair-based non-profit Succeed2gether, which offers after-school one-on-one tutoring and enrichment classes with the aim of closing the education and opportunity gaps in Essex County, NJ. You can read more about Succeed2gether and the festival at www.succeed2gether.org.