Salman Rushdie Is Now on Substack

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

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

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

Mr. Rushdie has at all times 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 instructed my 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 (typically shapeless) epistles that already make up Substack’s many 1000’s of newsletters.

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

“I really feel that, with this new world of data know-how, literature has not but discovered a very unique house in there,” he mentioned.

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

He provided a style of what could are available an essay assortment revealed this 12 months, “Languages of Fact,” a rangy work tackling all the things from Shakespeare to the demise 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,” acquired the same reception.

Mr. Rushdie’s transfer to Substack, a platform higher recognized amongst tech bloggers and journalists, could also be a coup for each events. The novelist offers 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 mentioned of his new experiment. “I’m as curious as anyone else.”