Salman Rushdie will release his next book on an online platform for subscribers

From the book “Venice. History of water and land"

Salman Rushdie will release his next book, a short novella “The Seventh Wave,” on the online platform Substack, sending subscribers small portions of text approximately once a week. The writer told the newspapers The Guardian and The New York Time about this.

According to Rushdie, the story will be about a film director and actor; the writer intends to create it in the spirit of French new wave cinema. The first draft of The Seventh Wave was 60,000 words, but for his Substack account, Salman 's Sea of ​​Stories, Rushdie cut it by about half. He plans to send small snippets of text to subscribers about once a week for a year. The first issues will be free, and subsequently the writer plans to charge a small fee ($5 or $6) for access to the remaining parts.

In addition, according to Rushdie, he will use his Substack account for other purposes - publishing other stories, essays and texts about cinema. According to the writer, he always dreamed of becoming a film critic (and once almost got such an opportunity at the New Yorker magazine), and during quarantine he watched many classic films from the French and Italian new waves. On his account you can already read an essay about Luis Buñuel and one short story in two parts .

According to Rushdie, 74, working on “The Seventh Wave” and other texts for the online platform will not distract him from writing his 21st novel, which will be published as a regular paper book. According to the writer, he decided to try cooperation with Substack as an experiment after the platform itself approached him with an offer to open an account. Rushdie had not heard of her before, but when he learned that Substack had already attracted other famous authors to collaborate, he decided to agree.

Working with an online platform that sends small portions of text to subscribers will allow the author to receive feedback from readers before the entire story is published. Rushdie did not rule out that as a result of this communication, if readers want to influence the development of the plot, he may meet them halfway. In this regard, he recalled that such interaction between the author and his readers is far from new: back in 1748, readers of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, published in separate volumes, expressed wishes that the main character would eventually fall in love with Lovelace. When Lovelace raped Clarissa in the story, Richardson received many letters from readers declaring their desire for the novel to end well at all costs. Contrary to this, Richardson completed his work in an emphatically tragic way. In the 19th century, many novels that have become classics today were also published in the form of magazine publications with sequels (“Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” by Dickens, “Madame Bovary” by Flaubert, “War and Peace” by Tolstoy and others), and readers had the opportunity to express their opinions to the author. opinion about the development of the plot.

Substack is a popular platform for independent authors in the United States. It allows readers to subscribe to an individual author, who can both post texts for everyone to see and send them to subscribers by email for money. Most authors, including many well-known American journalists, offer readers both types of content - free and paid. Salman Rushdie, a Booker winner, published a book of essays in 2021 called Languages ​​of Truth , and his latest work of fiction, the novel Quichotte (2019), is a retelling of Don Quixote » Cervantes in a postmodern spirit. Critics greeted both books without enthusiasm.