East, West

In this brilliant collection - his first major work of fiction since The Satanic Verses - one of the great writers in the world today gives us nine stories that together reveal the intricate intimacies and unbridgeable distances between the East and the West. A rickshaw driver dreams of being a Bombay movie star while, in a futuristic Western dystopia, legendary Hollywood icons acquire magic powers. Indian diplomats who as childhood friends hatched "Star Trek" fantasies must boldly go into a hidden universe of conspiracy and violence; and Hamlet's jester, too, is caught up in murderous…