Salman Rushdie Choosing Books for Hotel Rooms
The British-Indian writer has made of list of 13 books for Manhattan hotel guests to read in their rooms. The Standard Hotel asked the famous writer to provide them with a reading list for their guests. And he complied, coming up with a selection of 13 books to be recommended to visitors of the Manhattan Hotel. The selections includes various American literary classics.
The Standard Hotel in New York is planning to equip every room with a book from those chosen by Rushdie. This way, guests who have left their reading material at home, can still spend a pleasant evening in the company of quality literature.
Guests will be finding books in the their rooms starting from next week, when the World Voices Festival of International Literature takes place in New York.
Salman Rushdie chairs the festival, organised by literary association PEN. The Standard Hotel is one of the venues for the event, which will bring together writers from all over the world. More than 100 authors from 40 countries will be present.
Rushdie's 13-book selection is quite diverse. However, all the books picked by the writer are American classics, so none of his novels are on the list.
The list includes such classics as "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Sound and The Fury" by William Faulkner, but more recent literature is also well-represented.
Michael Chabon's novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay", published in 2000, is the newest of the literary works chosen by Salman Rushdie for the pleasure of hotel guests.
Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is the only volume of poetry on the list. However, the selection includes three short story collections, written by Flannery O'Connor, Bernard Malamud and Eudora Welty.
Other Rushdie selections include novels such as "Humboldt's Gift" by Saul Bellow, "Portnoy's Complaint" by Philip Roth, "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, and "Beloved" by Toni Morrison.
The books in the hotel rooms won't be new, but well worn-out. They were obtained through Housing Works, a fund-raising organisation for AIDS sufferers.
Salman Rushdie is a celebrated British-Indian writer, born in Bombay and educated at Cambridge. His acclaimed novel "Midnight's Children" won the Mann Booker Prize in 1981, and was later awarded the Booker of Bookers.
The World Voices Festival of International Literature will take place between April 25th and May 1st in various locations in New York.
