About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic 
 
Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers’ fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men – one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure – living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal. 
 
‘Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives’ The Times

Shame

R K Narayan

Assuming the character of a wise village storyteller, R K Narayan sits in the cool of an imaginary evening to recount the tales of the centuries.Taken from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and other Indian epics, the gods and demons, saints and sinners assume their symbolic and philosophical roles without ever losing their human characteristics. It is a measure of the author's achievement that he so subtly imbues them with his own distinctive wit and vision.This book is illustrated throughout by Narayan's brother R K Laxman, with woodcuts based on temple carvings.

Gods Demons And Others

Intan Paramaditha

Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors.

In this dazzling debut story collection from celebrated Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, fairytale, taboo, lust and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix. 
 
A black velvet butterfly darts out of a cave. Menstrual blood pools in the backseat of a car. Rats pour forth from an open doorway. 
 
These stories set in the Indonesian everyday – in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns – reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Melding horror and myth, this is subversive feminist fiction at its finest, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave. 
 
The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

Apple and Knife

Tania James

'There he was, his trunk wrapped in hers. Whatever hurt or sorrow befell him was not really happening to him. He was on the other bank with his mother. He was not here' 
 
When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers, he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name, the Gravedigger, from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves. Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting. 
 
Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption, until eventually she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal. 
 
'One of the most unusual and affecting books... a compulsively readable, devastating novel' Jonathan Safran Foer 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

The Tusk That Did the Damage

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

Kenji Miyazawa

Japanese fairy tales - enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings and the great natural world. 
 
Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa's stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories such as 'The Ungrateful Rat' where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets - until he meets the Rat Trap. There are morality tales such as 'The Restaurant of Many Orders', where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa's best-known 'Night Train to the Stars', where a magical steam train carries children through the night and up to the heavens. 
 
These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan's most beloved early twentieth-century writers. 
 
WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID MITCHELL AND AN INTRODUCTION BY KAORI NAGAI 
 
'Kenji Miyazawa fables are international-class' David Mitchell 
 
'For readers who relish the disturbing material of fairy tale, the specificity and surprise of tanka, collisions of the everyday with the supernatural and glimpses of Japan right on the brink of industrialization, Kenji Miyazawa's masterly stories will be a delight' New York Times 
 
'Few works have given me so much pleasure (and hard work) as the tales of Miyazawa Kenji [...] more genuine originality, and a more universal appeal, than almost anything else I have done.' John Bester, translator

Night Train to the Stars

beloved, enigmatic Japanese folk tales

Angela Carter

Discover Angela Carter's classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales woven in seductive, luminous storytelling. 
 
Beauty is turned into a Beast, Little Red Riding’s grandmother is stoned to death as a witch and, in the title story, a beautiful young pianist is swept into the world of a rich and sinister aristocrat, a man whose previous three wives have all died in mysterious circumstances. 
 
From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. 
 
'Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality' Ian McEwan 
 
'A quirky, original, and baroque stylist' Margaret Atwood 
 
With an introduction from award-winning short story writer Helen Simpson

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

A special edition of the feminist cult classic

John Fowles

An extraordinary work of fiction, from one of the world's most exceptional writers. 
 
A journalist visits an elderly painter and becomes intrigued by his young female companions. Four years' worth of book research is set on fire in front of a writer. A successful MP disappears without a trace. 
 
Written with stylistic innovation, this sequence of novellas exploring the nature of art echoes the themes and preoccupations of Fowles' earlier work and cements his position as a master storyteller. 
 
'Pick up any of these stories and you won't, as they say, be able to put it down' Financial Times

The Ebony Tower

Anne Carson

This is a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. It is queer coming-of-age love story, a Greek myth retold, and a modern classic. 
 
Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles&rsquo; return. 
 
Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it&rsquo;s like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem - moving, disturbing and delightful. 
 
'Totally engrossing' Ocean Vuong 
 
'This book is amazing - I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing' Alice Munro 
 
&lsquo;A profound love story...sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender&rsquo; Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review

Autobiography of Red

José Saramago

For two years Solomon the elephant has lived in Lisbon. Now King Dom João III wishes to make him a wedding gift for a Hapsburg archduke in Vienna. The only way for Solomon to get to his new home is to walk. So begins a journey that will take the stalwart elephant across the dusty plains of Castile, over the sea to Genoa and up to northern Italy where, like Hannibal's elephants before him, he must cross the snowy Alps. Based on a true story, Saramago’s tale is an enchanting mix of fact, fable and fantasy.

The Elephant's Journey

Hans Christian Andersen

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of the very best, most dark and delightful fairy tales with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon 
 
This collection gathers together some of the most iconic fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen. Using old folk tales as his raw material, Andersen told stories full of darkness, magic, power and meaning, stories that have become central to Western culture and literature. Discover the original story of ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and many more. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

Fairy Tales

Monique Roffey

'His stomach trembled with desire and fear and wonder because he knew what he'd seen. A woman. Right there, in the water' 
 
On a quiet day, near the Caribbean island of Black Conch, a mermaid raises her barnacled head from the flat grey sea. She is attracted by David, a fisherman waiting for a catch, singing to himself with his guitar. Aycayia the mermaid has been living in the vast ocean all alone for centuries. 
 
When Aycayia is caught and dragged ashore by American tourists, David rescues her with the aim of putting her back in the ocean. But it is soon clear that the mermaid is already transforming into a woman. 
 
This is the story of their love affair, of an island and of the great wide sea. 
 
'Mesmerising' Maggie O'Farrell 
'A unique talent' Bernadine Evaristo 
'Not your standard mermaid' Margaret Atwood 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.

The Mermaid of Black Conch

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