Berkeley Arts & Letters and India Currents present world-renowned storyteller and internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie for his new book Quichotte, in conversation with 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Andrew Sean Greer.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across present-day America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and The Golden House; one collection of short stories; and four works of nonfiction. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a

Author Andrew Sean Greer, photographed at Book Passage is promoting his latest novel, “Less,”
Author Andrew Sean Greer, photographed at Book Passage is promoting his latest novel, “Less,”

Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, been a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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