SALMAN RUSHDIE presents QUICHOTTE

Berkeley Arts & Letters presents world-renowned storyteller and internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses) as he presents an electrifying, modernized classic that fractures and reforms our conception of love in a whirlwind journey across present-day America.

Please note: This event is ticketed, and will take place at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison Street, Oakland. Tickets, including discounted book bundles, will be available in advance here soon. Advance sales are highly recommended. Unless otherwise noted here, general admission tickets will be available at the door.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

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Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels: —Luka and the Fire of Life, Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House — and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction — Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line — and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

​Please note:

Doors at 6pm. Program at 7pm. Duration of event is subject to author’s preference.

Signing details TBA soon.

Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable. All ticket sales are final.

This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.