Salman Rushdie's Cities

Written in a lucid and compelling style, Salman Rushdie's Cities is both a major contribution to work on Rushdie's fiction and a probing investigation of the relationships between interconnected global cities. Tracing parallels across cultures, Parashkevova explores the significance of Rushdie's urban praxis for a historicized view of the ‘contemporary', which stresses the political worldliness of literature. -- Professor John Thieme, University of East Anglia, UK
In Salman Rushdie's Cities, Vassilena Parashkevova provides timely and theoretically astute analysis of Rushdie's representations of such cities as Bombay, New York, Karachi, and London, arguing that his depictions are inspired by the reflective yet illusory potential of the mirror. As in the Indian embroidery tradition of mirrorwork (by which Rushdie himself has also been inspired), the writing and research in this important monograph is meticulously detailed and elegantly patterned. -- Dr Claire Chambers, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
‘Reading Rushdie through topographies both real and imaginary, from his idealising nostalgia for Bombay to his vision of Jahilia, has given Vassilena Parashkevova a subtle passkey to this author's polymorphous and ever-provocative mind. She has entered the invisible cities of Rushdie's fiction and political thought, with their mirror pairs of utopias and dystopias, transgressors and conservatives, transformers and self-exiles, strangers, and natives, and fashioned a lucid, learned, richly detailed and stimulating analysis, which does justice to Rushdie's brilliance and fertility, while taking cognizance of his tics and limits.' -- Marina Warner, Professor, University of Essex, UK, and author of Stranger Magic
Readers do not have to have read and be familiar with Rushdie’s novels to read this book. Parashkevova gets her points across through concise and adept description of plots, narratives and characters, so that non-Rushdie readers can follow and appreciate Parashkevova’s arguments. Those who have read the novels, however, will benefit from a different perspective on the worlds within […] On the whole, the book’s writing is smart and densely packed, and its pace fast and unrelenting […] Salman Rushdie’s cities provides a critical lens into the portrayal and evolution of cities and its inhabitants in Rushdie’s novels. It masterfully combines literary criticism, urban theory and political commentary… -- Khairunnisa Ibrahim, University of Oxford * UGRG Book Review Series *