Rushdie Returns to Fiction, With Mortality on His Mind

Rushdie Returns to Fiction, With Mortality on His Mind

THE ELEVENTH HOUR: A Quintet of Stories, by Salman Rushdie Mortality is on Salman Rushdie’s mind. And who can blame him? After living under an Iranian fatwa for three-plus decades, he survived an early case of Covid-19 only to be almost murdered by a knife-wielding assailant before a live audience in Chautauqua, N.Y., in 2022. “That is no country for old men,” W.B. Yeats wrote of Ireland almost a century ago in “Sailing to Byzantium.” And Americ…