Art and Culture # 47: Sir Salman Rushdie is writing a Book Exclusively for Substack, a free speech platform!
-For the Uncensored!
Over the past few years, publishing has changed dramatically. When you realize that regular publishers won’t publish your book for five years, or even worse, cancel you for a wrong opinion. This is the disgusting nature of the publishing industry. Very few success stories happen in the world. With Salman Rushdie, who was once a beacon for controversy, has managed to survive a landscape where many of his contemporaries quit or retired from writing books.
Martin Amis famously quit novels in 2015. He didn’t need to, but considering that Martin Amis is reaching his years where much of his work was accomplished, even Don Delilo is still writing. To me, writing is still a beautiful concept. Everyone can pick up a pen and start writing. But many give up when they know that it’s not a great way to make money. Yes, if you are just seeing this, welcome to the real world. I have said this in some various degree, but the reality is hard to face.
When you manage to send your manuscript to every fucking agent and they keep rejecting you, it’s pretty clear that they just have to refuse people without even reading the manuscript anyway. We’ll get back to the topic but this needs to be said first. Realizing this, people usually just give up. Nobody needs huge publishers anymore, and you can self publish. What makes the ability to write more insufferable is not how good people are, but they can’t accept everyone.
I mean, do you have to do something drastic? With the rise of the Internet, self published works saw more reactions than most legacy best sellers. It’s a win win for readers and writers. It’s like people can enjoy writers for what they are, and not what publishers want to present the writer as. Some cool hip boomer short sentence fucker with dead eyes that can’t even talk to regular people.
Writers have more options to write what they want, and without being censored. They can pick out what needs to be in the book, or not. You don’t need a big publisher or agent to help you anymore. But then, it can be exhausting if you don’t have time to promote the book. Social Media used to be a beacon for that, and it can still be used like that, but always make a personal and professional account.
But that won’t stop the publishers from disregarding your work. People get tired of being rejected. That’s like asking every woman out on a date and they won’t accept you. So, as self publishing entered the stratosphere in the late 2010, people don’t have to rely on publishers anymore.
Yes, I get that I talk about this a lot, but there’s so many writers self publishing online that it even dwarfs me. What isn’t unsurprising is that it will take a big name to give a small writing platform the exposure it needs.
Salman Rushdie, famous for The Satanic Verses, a book that was so controversial it offended the old wullah, Ayatolloah Ruhollah Kohmeni in Iran, and put a fatwa (a religious hit order, which was illegal in Islam) on Rushdie, on Valentines Day 1989. What makes Salman Rushdie a legend is that he survived ten years with British Secret Service constantly protecting him.
Sir Salman Rushdie has lived to see all his work be published since then, and it proves that Salman Rushdie is not just a man for all seasons, but a risk taker. Knighted by the Queen on June 16th 2007, Salman Rushdie is the salt and the shaker for which literature dances along magic realism but a shape shifter of the 20th century authors. A man who knows the power of freedom of speech and survived to tell the tale. Creating worlds that are controversial but haunting, hilarious, and poetic at the same time.
If the man was a typhoon, he should come with a warning label. A genius writers of sheer magnitude that with his years of experience of writing beautiful prose, but also nonfiction throughout the years.
What does this mean for Substack to have gained a new powerful voice of prose? It creates legitimacy, but also proof that no matter how big or small, Substack is where freedom of speech and the immediacy of words exist. And to have gained Sir Salman Rushdie, who sits at the table of many writers, he also can express himself in a way unlike in any other time. Immediately and without fear of censorship or cancellation.
Since then he has published over 22 works, 15 works of fiction, (Satanic Verses, Shame, Shalimar the Clown, to list a few) including 2 children’s books (Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life), and 4 collected works of nonfiction essays spanning three decades of literary criticism and a memoir, Anton Chekov.
-Louis Bruno is the author of more than 19 books, including, The Michael Project, The Michael Project: Book 2: The Lost Children of Eve, Thy Kingdom Come, The Disintegrating Bloodline, Apocalypse Soldier, Hierarchy of Dwindling Sheep. His books can be found on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Lulu. He can be found on Gab, https://gab.com/thereallouistbruno, Minds https://www.minds.com/lbruno8063/. Instagram @lbrruno8063 and @louisbrunoofficialbook. Our Freedom Book https://www.ourfreedombook.com/thereallouistbruno17. He has written for the Intellectual Conservative and Ephemere. His next series, City of Sand is out now:https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/louis-bruno/city-of-sand/hardcover/product-rke9jz.html?page=1&pageSize=4. Also, if you can’t subscribe so that you can get members only content, please be sure to share the articles, as well. Every little bit helps in the war against Big Tech. Thanks for reading.