Salman Rushdie Is Now on Substack

“I imply, if I have been publishing a ebook, I’d get more cash,” he stated.

He nonetheless plans to carry again his huge swings for the normal outfits and is at work on a novel to be printed by Random Home.

Substack has money to burn. It has raised practically $83 million at a valuation of $650 million, and it not too long ago acquired Cocoon, a social media app that’s pushed by subscriptions and doesn’t embrace any promoting.

Mr. Rushdie has all the time been a maximalist, on the web page and in life. His fiction is a extremely stylized mix of magical realism and meta-theatrical storytelling, tales inside tales informed by a number of narrators. He has had an adventurous private life and has been married a number of instances. In some ways, Substack appears a pure venue for Mr. Rushdie. His catholicity of tastes and pursuits lends itself to the usually expansive (generally shapeless) epistles that already make up Substack’s many hundreds of newsletters.

Nonetheless, Mr. Rushdie thinks the written phrase has stalled relating to the online.

“I really feel that, with this new world of knowledge expertise, literature has not but discovered a extremely unique area in there,” he stated.

He added that he favored Substack’s potential for experimentation. “Simply no matter comes into my head, it simply provides me a means of claiming one thing instantly, with out mediators or gatekeepers,” Mr. Rushdie stated.

He supplied a style of what might are available in an essay assortment printed this yr, “Languages of Reality,” a rangy work tackling all the things from Shakespeare to the dying of Osama bin Laden. Critics flayed the ebook, with one calling it a “confused imaginative and prescient of this century.” His most up-to-date work of fiction, “Quichotte,” a postmodern retelling of “Don Quixote,” received a similar reception.

Mr. Rushdie’s transfer to Substack, a platform higher identified amongst tech bloggers and journalists, could also be a coup for each events. The novelist provides the tech start-up some literary heft, whereas Substack lends a modish sheen to an creator getting into his twilight years, a interval when big-name novelists are sometimes maintaining a tally of Stockholm whereas pretending to not.

“Let’s see the way it goes,” he stated of his new experiment. “I’m as curious as anyone else.”