Noakes Jonathan - Salman Rushdie: Midnights children, Shame, the satanic verses

CONTENTS

VINTAGE LIVING TEXTS
Midnights Children

Jonathan Noakes has taught English in secondary schools in Britain and Australia for fifteen years. For six years he ran A-level English studies at Eton College where he is a house-master.

Margaret Reynolds is Reader in English at Queen Mary, University of London, and the presenter of BBC Radio 4s Adventures in Poetry. Her publications include The Sappho Companion and (with Angela Leighton) Victorian Women Poets.

SERIES EDITORS
Jonathan Noakes
and
Margaret Reynolds

In Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Salman Rushdie. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with Salman Rushdie, relating specifically to the texts under discussion.

This guide deals with Rushdies themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will provide a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.

Also included in this guide are detailed reading plans for all three novels, questions for essays and discussion, contextual material, suggested texts for complementary and comparative reading, extracts from reviews, a biography, a bibliography and a glossary of literary terms.

Whether a teacher, student or general reader, the Vintage Living Texts series gives you the chance to explore new resources and enjoy new pleasures.

Martin Amis

Margaret Atwood

Louis de Bernires

Sebastian Faulks

Ian McEwan

Toni Morrison

Jeanette Winterson

Also available in Vintage

Quite simply the most absorbing, the most entertaining book you are likely to read all year

Mail on Sunday

This is a fabulous, glowing, witty and brilliant epic... This is the Ulysses of rock n roll... glittering writing humane and very funny

Independent

Vina Apsara, a famous and much loved singer with a wild and irresistible voice, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks and again finds her, over and over throughout his own extraordinary life in music. Set in the inspiring, vain, fabulous world of rock n roll, this is the story of a love that stretches across continents, across Vina and Ormuss whole lives, and even beyond death.

The first great rock n roll novel in the English language

Times

A ground-breaking work... Rushdie turns our century of celebrity and atrocity inside out. He makes you see the world in a new light

Time Out

Uniquely exhilarating... Salman Rushdie once more proves his mastery... His sheer linguistic energy is a delight

Sunday Telegraph

Also available in Vintage

Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award

A triumph... affectionate and masterly

New York Times Book Review

A wonderful book, gorgeous in colour and texture, magnificent in scope, wildly funny

Independent on Sunday

Salman Rushdies latest and so far greatest novel... held me in its thrall and provided the richest fictional experience of 1995

Antonia Fraser, Books of the Year, Sunday Times

Rushdie is still our most exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist, a writer of breathtaking originality

Shashi Tharoor, Financial Times

Endlessly inventive, witty, digressional and diverting

Michael Ratcliffe, Observer

Also available in Vintage

Both a howl of rage and a love letter... Rushdie is a very great novelist our greatest

Guardian

He writes like an angel: an erudite, playful, imaginative, wildly intelligent angel... the cadences of every paragraph are graceful as landing swans... Rushdie is an irrepressibly playful entertainer, as well as a web-weaving story teller

Financial Times

Thrilling writing... A simmering novel, as crammed with passion and potholes as a New York street

Independent

Rushdie has found inspiration in New York, and pulls apart the citys every nuance in this dark and brilliant comedy

GQ

About this series

VINTAGE LIVING TEXTS : The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature is a new concept in reading guides. Our aim is to provide readers of all kinds with an intelligent and accessible introduction to key works of contemporary literature. Each guide suggests techniques for reading important contemporary novels, and offers a variety of back-up materials that will give you ways into the text without ever telling you what to think.

Content

All the books reproduce an extensive interview with the author, conducted exclusively for this series. This is not to say that we believe that the authors word is law. Of course it isnt. Once his or her book has gone out into the world he or she becomes simply yet another if singularly competent reader. This series recognises that an authors contribution may be valuable, and intriguing, but it puts the reader in control.

Every title in the series is author-focused and covers at least three of their novels, along with relevant biographical, bibliographical, contextual and comparative material.

How to use this series

In the reading activities that make up the core of each book you will see that you are asked to do two things. One comes from the text; that is, we suggest what you should focus on, whether its a theme, the language or the narrative method. The other concentrates on your own response. We want you to think about how you are reading and what skills you are bringing to bear in doing that reading. So this part is very much about you, the reader.

The point is that there are many ways of responding to a text. You could concentrate on the methods you might use to compare this text with others. In that case, look for the sections headed Compare. Or you might want to do something more individual, and analyse how you are reacting to a text and what it means to you, in which case, pick out the approaches labelled Imagine or Ask Yourself.

Of course, it may well be that you are reading these texts for an examination. In that case you will have to go for the more traditional methods of literary criticism and look for the responses that tell you to Discuss or Analyse. Whichever level you (or your students) are at, you will find that there is something here for everyone. However, were not suggesting that you stick solely to the approaches we offer, or that you tackle all of the exercises laid out here. Choose whatever most interests you, or whatever best suits your purposes.