Salman Rushdie services New York hotel rooms with books

In honour of PEN World Voices festival in New York, which he is chairing, novelist selects books for the city's high-end Standard Hotel

by: Alison Flood

Guests staying at New York's luxury Standard hotel next week will not have to resort to copies of the Gideon Bible if they find themselves short of reading material. Instead, their bedside tables are being furnished with a selection of books picked by a somewhat unlikely maid: Salman Rushdie.


As founder of the PEN World Voices festival and chair of this year's event, which takes place in New York next week, Rushdie has selected a series of American classics for the rooms at The Standard, which is hosting many of the festival's events. The Booker prize-winning author has come up with a wide-ranging line-up for guests, from Walt Whitman's 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass to Philip Roth's 1969 tale of the sex-obsessed Alexander Portnoy, Portnoy's Complaint.

Other titles picked by Rushdie range from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, while a more modern perspective is provided by Toni Morrison's Beloved, Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Thomas Pynchon's V, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Those wishing to dip into a book of short stories of an evening might be tempted by Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, or collections by Eudora Welty and Bernard Malamud, while science fiction comes from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

The PEN festival, which is intended to "celebrate the power of the writer's voice as a bold and vital element of public discourse", runs from 25 April to 1 May in New York, featuring more than 100 writers from 40 nations, from Harold Bloom to Hanif Kureishi, Amélie Nothomb, Elif Shafak and Irvine Welsh. Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka will deliver the Arthur Miller freedom to write lecture on the closing night.

Announcing the festival earlier this year, Rushdie said it would enable visitors "to hear from writers from every corner of the globe". He added that: "What becomes clear is that the role of the intellectual varies tremendously from country to country. In tyrannical or authoritarian regimes, people turn to writers and intellectuals to serve as the conscience of those countries. On the other hand, in free societies, you have a country like France, in which the voice of the writer is at the centre of politics – or a country like the US, in which the role of the intellectual has steadily declined. We now call on the public intellectual to have a much louder and more potent voice in American political life."


from: Guardian