(This podcast contains explicit content) After the 1989 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses led Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his death, Salman Rushdie went underground, living under police protection for almost 10 years until the fatwa was lifted in 1998. He draws the title of his new memoir from the alias he adopted during this time, a combination of the first names of two writers he loved: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Rushdie is the author of 16 books, including Midnight's Children, winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 and the “Booker of Bookers” Prize in 1993; Shalimar the Clown; and The Enchantress of Florence, which was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by the Washington Post.

Spanning four decades, a dozen novels, several short story collections and works of nonfiction, two screenplays, and hundreds of reviews and essays, Martin Amis’s influential career testifies to a lifetime devoted to literature. A writer who is “dark, satirical, and gifted with irascibility” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), Amis has been described as the undisputed master of what the New York Times called “the new unpleasantness.” English tabloid culture takes a beating in his new book, a characteristically gruesome satire about an unusually principled thug raising his bookish nephew.

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture