Part One -- Wonder Tales -- Proteus -- Heraclitus -- Another Writer's Beginnings -- Part Two -- Philip Roth -- Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five -- Samuel Beckett's Novels -- Cervantes and Shakespeare -- Gabo and I -- Harold Pinter -- Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, Vol. IV -- Autobiography and the Novel -- Adaptation -- Notes on Sloth -- Hans Christian Andersen -- David Remnick's King of the World -- Very Well Then, I Contradict Myself -- Part Three -- Truth -- Courage -- Texts for PEN -- Christopher Hitchens -- The Liberty Instinct -- Osama Bin Laden -- Ai Weiwei and Others -- The Half-Woman God -- Nova Southeastern University Commencement Address 2006 -- Emory University Commencement Address 2015 -- Part Four -- The Composite Artist: the Emperor Akbar and the Making of the Hamzanama -- Amrita Sher-Gil: Letters -- Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003) -- Being Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits at the Gagosian Gallery, London, 2005 -- Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar at the Whitney Museum, New York, 2007 -- Kara Walker at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2009 -- Sebastião Salgado -- The Unbeliever's Christmas -- Carrie Fisher -- Pandemic: A Personal Engagement with the Coronavirus -- The Proust Questionnaire: Vanity Fair.

"Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, illuminating deep truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing, prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word, and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time. Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2019, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie's own intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, often by telling vivid, sometimes humorous stories of his own personal encounters with them, whether on the page or in person. He delves deeper than ever before into the nature of "truth," revels in the vibrant malleability of language, and the creative lines that can join art and life, and he looks anew at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. The ideas, true stories and arguments presented here are at once revelatory, funny and eye-opening, enlivened on every page by Rushdie's signature wit and dazzling voice, making this volume a genuine pleasure to read"--