In the following essay, Shankar explores contemporary Indian literature, noting Rushdie's role as a postcolonial Indian author and utilizing Rushdie's commentary and critiques on postcolonial literature.

In the following essay, Teverson explores Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories as “a complex allegory that emphasizes the importance of exchange between different cultural groupings,” comparing it with such works as Arabian Nights, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

In the following essay, D'Haen defines the origins of magical realism and postmodernism in literature, examining the use of the former in the works of Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter. D'Haen proposes that elements of magical realism and fantasy are often used by writers who are writing from a non-centric point of view.

In the following essay, Almond examines Rushdie's portrayal of Islam throughout his body of work.

In the following essay, Clark explores Rushdie's extensive use of other worlds in his novels, commenting that “Rushdie's fiction can be especially disconcerting to those who believe (or want to believe) that the forces of the universe exist in a meaningful harmony.”

In the following essay, Cook considers the theme of cultural displacement in Rushdie's work, noting that “all of Rushdie's novels can be read as an acknowledgment that reality takes precedence over art, that ‘the unchanging twoness of things’ can never be reconciled to ‘the universe of what-happened-next.’”

In the following essay, Sawhney and Sawhney investigate how Rushdie's political essays changed after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and discuss the shifting critical reaction to his political viewpoints.

In the following essay, Cook finds Rushdie's central contribution to contemporary literature to be his exploration of cultural change and transformation.

In the following review, Siegel identifies Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as textual inspirations for Rushdie's Fury.

In the following review, Wood finds Fury to be a pretentious, outdated apologia.

[Michael T. Kaufman]: How would you characterize the political position, or rather, the political lament, of your novels about India and Pakistan? [Salman Rushdie]: Well, I think it's very difficult for a writer in the 20th century to look at the world and avoid a tragic view.

In the following review, Lahr regards The Wizard of Oz to be a “shrewd and joyous assessment of a film that has played such a large part in the imaginative landscape of America, and in [Rushdie's own.”]

In the following review, Joshi offers a mixed assessment of the essays collected in Step across This Line.

In the following review, Edric maintains that “the real problem with Fury lies not so much with its absurd and near non-existent plot or with its failure to deliver, but with the writing itself.”

In the following favorable review, Rubin asserts that Fury is “an acrid, sharp, self-critical portrait of an angry man in an anger-inducing world.”

The novel as global metaphor is currently unfashionable, except when it comes in the guise of science fiction or political satire. Grimus is neither of these, though it spills over into both areas. Dimension-fever, thought-forms, a mysterious Effect haunt the book like the monoliths of 2001: forces to be reckoned with because they are never quite accounted for. But Salman Rushdie doesn't posit a hypothetical future, or warn of things to come: indeed, he makes it plain that what he is writing about is...

[The characters and plot elements of Grimus] comprise a pretty flashy bunch of ingredients which could easily have yielded silly melodrama. In this artful first novel, Rushdie manages not only to turn them all into a good story, but also to present it all seriously without pomposity via notably witty prose. There are a few passages where he seems to be trying too hard, but in general, after a slow start, the book takes off like Flapping Eagle's namesake. Rushdie is a talent to watch. &#x...

The hero of [the] intricately plotted [Grimus] is Flapping Eagle, an outcast Indian weary of the immortality conferred on him some 700 years ago by a mysterious elixir…. Rushdie unwinds solutions to his various conundrums—involving a misappropriated alien artifact and a plurality of probability-continuums—with inventive wit and an elegant sense of pacing. The story is ultimately overburdened with ingenuities, but for the most part they are real ingenuities. An imagination to watch.