To cross a frontier is to be transformed....The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier, we can't avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world's harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier's windowless halls, we see things as they are.

In this collection of nonfiction, Salman Rushdie crosses over the frontier and sees and tells things as they are, inviting readers to "step across this line" with him.

The essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in Step Across This Line, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The collection chronicles Rushdie's intellectual odyssey and is also an especially personal look into the writer's psyche. With the same fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and very strong opinions that distinguish his fiction, Rushdie writes about his fascination with The Wizard of Oz, his obsession with soccer, and the state of the novel, among many other topics. Most notably, delving into his unique personal experience fighting the Iranian fatwa, he addresses the subject of militant Islam in a series of challenging and deeply felt responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book ends with the eponymous "Step Across This Line," a lecture Rushdie delivered at Yale in the spring of 2002, which has never been published before and is sure to prompt discussion.

Rushdie's first collection of nonfiction, Imaginary Homelands , offered a unique vision of politics, literature, and culture for the 1980s. Step Across This Line does the same and more for the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

"Sometimes pensive, sometimes marvelously funny, always lucid essays, reviews, and occasional pieces by the renowned Anglo-Indian novelist." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The essays crackle with [Rushdie's] enthusiasm, humor, and intelligence." The Miami Herald

"Step Across This Line unmasks Rushdie himself: Rushdie the film critic, political activist, Indian-exile-British citizen, object of political persecution, secular Muslim, political liberal, and brilliant writer." David Shneer, Rocky Mountain News

"Given the world's current conflagrations, anyone who has written about the dangers of Muslim fundamentalism now seems prescient. Still, there's something eerily prophetic in some of the newspaper columns reprinted in Salman Rushdie's new collection of nonfiction, Step Across This Line. As a man with terrifyingly acute firsthand experience of what Christopher Hitchens, to whom this book is dedicated, calls 'Islamo-fascism,' Rushdie has spent years fighting through the issues currently being hashed out on a thousand Op-Ed pages. Though this scattershot book ranges, with varying degrees of success, over subjects including The Wizard of Oz, Gandhi, and Elián González, the most penetrating pieces here deal with Rushdie's refreshingly ecumenical abhorrence of religious fundamentalism." Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com

"Salman Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air." The New York Times Book Review

Salman Rushdie is the author of eight novels — Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the "Booker of Bookers"), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury — and one work of short stories, East, West. He has also published four previous works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Mirrorwork.

Essays 1
Out of Kansas 3
The Best of Young British Novelists 31
Angela Carter 36
Beirut Blues 43
Arthur Miller at Eighty 46
In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again 49
Notes on Writing and the Nation 58
Influence 62
Adapting Midnight's Children 70
Reservoir Frogs 80
Heavy Threads 83
In the Voodoo Lounge 87
Rock Music - A Sleeve Note 92
U2 94
An Alternative Career 99
On Leavened Bread 102
On Being Photographed 104
Crash 109
The People's Game 113
Farming Ostriches 129
A Commencement Address 136
"Imagine There's No Heaven" 141
"Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!" 145
India's Fiftieth Anniversary 159
Gandhi, Now 165
The Taj Mahal 171
The Baburnama 173
A Dream of Glorious Return 180
II Messages From the Plague Years 211
III Columns 259
December 1998: Three Leaders 261
January 1999: The Millennium 263
February 1999: Ten Years of the Fatwa 265
March 1999: Globalization 267
April 1999: Rock Music 269
May 1999: Moron of the Year 272
June 1999: Kashmir 274
July 1999: Northern Ireland 276
August 1999: Kosovo 278
September 1999: Darwin in Kansas 280
October 1999: Edward Said 282
November 1999: Pakistan 284
December 1999: Islam and the West 286
January 2000: Terror Versus Security 288
February 2000: Jorg Haider 290
March 2000: Amadou Diallo 293
April 2000: Elian Gonzalez 295
May 2000: J. M. Coetzee 297
June 2000: Fiji 299
July 2000: Sport 301
August 2000: Two Crashes 303
September 2000: Senator Lieberman 305
October 2000: The Human Rights Act 307
November 2000: Going to Electoral College 309
December 2000: A Grand Coalition? 312
January 2001: How the Grinch Stole America 314
February 2001: Sleaze Is Back 317
March 2001: Crouching Striker, Hidden Danger 319
April 2001: It Wasn't Me 322
May 2001: Abortion in India 324
June 2001: Reality TV 326
July 2001: The Release of the Bulger Killers 329
August 2001: Arundhati Roy 331
September 2001: Telluride 333
October 2001: The Attacks on America 336
November 2001: Not About Islam? 339
February 2002: Anti-Americanism 341
March 2002: God in Gujarat 344
IV Step Across this Line 347
Acknowledgments 383
Index 385