Publisher's Statement on the Attack against Salman Rushdie

Literature is an instrument through which we put to test the very principles we live by. We may dislike what writers say but must defend, at all costs, their freedom to say it. That is what democracy is about: a system where people, free to express themselves, agree to disagree in peaceful civility.

The vicious attack against Salman Rushdie and his interlocutor Henry Reese at the Chautauqua Institution, a community founded in 1874 as an educational experiment devoted to showcasing art in all its manifestations, is an affront to the very principles we live by.

Every writer wants discerning, not destructive, readers. Rushdie, the author of the classic postcolonial novel Midnight’s Children about India’s transition from British rule to independence and subsequent partition, among other books, has been the target of ire along with several of his translators since Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

At Restless Books, our mission is to showcase the best literature from a myriad of cultures. We define “best” to include novels, memoirs, poems, and other writing that attempt to offer a deep, empathetic, and critical view of society using language in its most distilled form. Translators are essential to making the universes created by authors reach a global audience.

Literature is thus synonymous with openness and is antithetical to extremism. When individual voices are silenced, everyone’s freedom is lost. Rushdie’s novels are a prime example of the global dialogue that is required in democracy. Differences must be appreciated, not canceled.

—Ilan Stavans, Publisher of Restless Books

A Reading List for Deepak Unnikrishnan's 'Temporary People'

In advance of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing-winner Deepak Unnikrishnan's March 22 event at Seminary Coop, the great Chicago bookstore asked him to participate in their “Reading is Critical” series, in which they invite visiting authors to submit a selected reading list of “Critical Reading”— titles that the author finds, personally, critical. We find Deepak's list to be so essential and illuminating—not only as a background for his debut novel, Temporary People, but also as a guide to some of the most vital contemporary and classic world literature—that we're sharing it here as well. Happy reading!

It took me a while to finish Temporary People. As I wrote and rewrote the work I realized I needed to read more to get better at what I wanted my work to do. I suppose you could say in order to write I needed to read and be better informed. And occasionally, watch things, like films. The following books (and other visual mediums) have profoundly influenced the way I see the world. This list does not represent everything I adore about literature, or everything that took to make Temporary People happen. Certainly not, but all of these names have been crucial to my understanding of the written word, and what could be possible with the craft. There are other names but these will do for now. I’m grateful to them all.  —Deepak Unnikrishnan

Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee

Notes from No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss

Alphabet, by Inger Christensen

English, by Jeet Thayil

The Iraqi Christ and The Madman of Freedom Square, by Hassan Blasim

Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala

Here, by Richard McGuire

Goat Days, by Benyamin

The Beast, by Óscar Martínez

Sex: An Oral History, by Harry Maurer

The Photographer, by Didier Lefevre, Emmanuel Guibert and Frederic Lemercier

The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset Maugham

One Day I Will Write About This Place, by Binyavanga Wainaina

Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, by Wilfred Thesiger

Cities of Salt (Trilogy), by Abdelrahman Munif    

Night Draws Near, by Anthony Shadid

Arabesques, by Anton Shammas

The Panchatantra

The Ramayana

The Mahabharata

One Thousand and One Nights

Today I Wrote Nothing, by Daniil Kharms  

The nonfiction of V. S. Naipaul

The work of Primo Levi

The work of Joe Sacco

The work of Enid Blyton

Comics: Amar Chitra Katha

Jimmy Corrigan, by Chris Ware

The stories of Nadine Gordimer

The stories of Lydia Davis

The stories of Zora Neale Hurston

The stories of Kuzhali Manickavel

Rashomon and other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Civilwarland in Bad Decline, by George Saunders

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

Bury Me Standing, by Isabel Fonseca

When Memory Dies, by A. Sivananthan

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

The Pig and the Skyscraper, by Marco D’eramo

City of Boys, by Beth Nugent

What You’ve Been Missing, by Janet DeSaulniers

A Seventh Man, by John Berger

The Gnomes of Gnu, The Bomb and the General, and The Three Astronauts, by Umberto Eco

Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer

The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia

This is Not a Novel, by David Markson

Workers, by Sebastiao Salgado (Photographs)

Waltz With Bashir, by Ari Folman (Documentary)

Latcho Drom, by Tony Gatlif (Documentary)

Leolo, by Jean-Claude Lauzon (Film)

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22 Great Author Quotes about Gabriel García Márquez

We lost one of our literary heroes with the passing of Gabriel García Márquez, author of the iconic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; Restless Books publisher and Márquez biographer Ilan Stavans calls it "a towering book of enormous influence worldwide." To celebrate the author, we've collected some of our favorite quotes about Gabriel García Márquez, by contemporary voices ranging from Thomas Pynchon to Salman Rushdie to Restless' own Hamid Ismailov. Read on, and feel free to leave your own reminiscences about Márquez in the comments.

Quotes in García Márquez's lifetime

“Oh boy, does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcímárquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar.”

     —Thomas Pynchon

“Chiselled stateliness and colorful felicities...distinguish everything García Márquez composes.”

     —John Updike

“The familiar García Márquez world [is] a mixture of phantasmagoria and a realism whose truths seem as incredible and strange as the moments of demonic magic.”

     —A.S. Byatt

“The whimsy and the magic are earned, it seems to me—which is to say that García Márquez starts off running on solid ground and simply takes off.”

    —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

“What Márquez is showing us all the time is the humanising power of the imagination. In all his writing, the imagination is no mere whimsy, nor a Latin-American eccentricity: it is a way of survival, as we say nowadays.”

     —Alastair Reid

Tributes to García Márquez after his passing

“The biggest hero that Latin America has ever had. He did more for us than Bolivar, Martí, and Sandino. [He united us] in a recognizable identity.”

     —Gioconda Belli

“Everything he wrote was gold….I wish I’d translated everything he ever wrote.”

     —Edith Grossman

“No one wrote better about the sin of pride, the corruption of power and the redemption of love. I will miss you, Gabriel García Márquez.”

     —Laila Lalami

"A great writer whose works brought wide knowledge and prestige to the literature of our language has died. His novels will outlive him and continue gaining readers from all over."

     —Mario Vargas Llosa

“You haven't lived until you read at least one novel or short story by Gabriel García Márquez. He helped open an emotional aperture.”

     —Terry McMillan

“Descansa en paz, querido Gabo. Te extrañaremos siempre, como a un padre. Tu legado es muy grande." ["Rest in peace, dear Gabo. We'll always miss you, as a father. Your legacy is great."]

     —Jon Lee Anderson

“I read One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time in high school. You know how some books break your world to remake it?”

     —Jesmyn Ward

"Love in the Time of Cholera I read at the city pool where I was a lifeguard. It made the world seem huge & the possibilities for love deep.

     —Maile Meloy

“Today I am remembering when Gabriel García Márquez visited Book Soup and humored me while I told him in my halting Spanish how honored I was to meet him. He was really sweet and kind, and I am pretty sure super fan C. Max Magee fainted. RIP, Márquez.”

     —Edan Lepucki

“It was like reading Dickens or Balzac. People in the streets read García Márquez. Every book he wrote had popular acclaim. So, in a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror, in a way.

     —Isabel Allende

“I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it — not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous “wonder tales” of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism…. For such magnificence, our only possible reaction is gratitude. He was the greatest of us all.”

     —Salman Rushdie

“I have the feeling that writers in Latin America can’t use the word ‘solitude’ any more, because they worry that people will think it’s a reference to Gabo. And I’m afraid that soon we will not be able to use the phrase ‘100 years’ either.”

     —Carlos Fuentes

“He really was a one-off and one would really have to go back to (Charles) Dickens to find a writer of the very highest literary quality who commanded such extraordinary persuasive powers over whole populations….[García Márquez's work had] almost a Shakespearean quality."

     —Ian McEwan

"I once made out with someone purely because I thought he might be related to Gabriel García Márquez. What a beautiful writer – RIP."

     —Lena Dunham

"If you've read him, you know that he's not really gone. He is in an afterlife of his own creation, his own Macondo."

     —Edwidge Danticat

"Cuba suffers from this death, as do all readers of a writer who is an icon."

     —Miguel Barnet

"Storytelling is such an important part of human being and with every story it is human nature to add something sort of magic, something kind of hyperbolic. When you are telling stories, you are sometimes hyperbolizing. And that was the essence of the technique of Márquez and he released this technique for the whole world."

     —Hamid Ismailov