1. Imaginary homeleands ; "Errata" : or, Unreliable narration in Midnight's children ; The riddle of midnight : India, August 1987 -- 2. Censorship ; The assassination of Indira Gandhi ; Dynasty ; Zia ul-Haq, 17 August 1988 ; Daughter of the East -- 3. "Commonwealth literature" does not exist ; Anita Desai ; Kipling ; Hobson-Jobson -- 4. Outside the whale ; Attenborough's Gandhi ; Satyajit Ray ; Handsworth songs ; The location of Brazil -- 5. The new empire within Britain ; An unimportant fire ; Home font ; V.S. Naipaul ; The painter and the pest -- 6. A general election ; Charter 88 ; On Palestinian identity : a conversation with Edward Said -- 7. Nadine Gordimer ; Rian Malan ; Nuruddin Farah ; Kapuściński's Angola -- 8. John Berger ; Graham Greene ; John Le Carré ; On adventure ; At the Adelaide Festival ; Traveling with Chatwin ; Chatwin's travels ; Julian Barnes ; Kazuo Ishiguro -- 9. Michel Tournier ; Italo Calvino ; Stephen hawking ; Andrei Sakharov ; Umberto Eco ; Günther Grass ; Heinrich Böll ; Siegfried Lenz ; Peter Schnewider ; Christoph Ransmayr ; Maurice Sendak and Wilhelm Grimm -- 10. Gabriel García Márquez ; Mario Varga Llosa -- 11. The language of the pack ; Begrett goes to Hollywood ; E.L. Doctorow ; Michael Herr : an interview ; Richard Ford ; Raymond Carver ; Isaac Bashevis SInger ; Philip Roth ; Saul Bellow ; Thomas Pynchon ; Kurt Vonnegut ; Grace Paley ; Travels with a golden ass ; The divine supermarket -- 12. Naipaul among the believers ; "In God we trust" ; In good faith ; Is nothing sacred? ; Why I have embraced Islam.

Seventy-five essays cover a decade in Rushdie's life, on such topics as literature, politics, prejudice, imagination, and free expression, as well as the events that forced him into seclusion.