The Eleventh Hour

Rushdie follows his memoir Knife with a marvelous story collection focused on themes of legacy and death. Three novella-length entries are bookended by two shorter works that previously appeared in the New Yorker: “In the South,” which centers on two 81-year-old men in southeastern India as they make their weekly trek to the post office to cash their pension slips, and “The Old Man in the Piazza,” about an elderly man whose success at solving disputes earns him a reputation for having “the wisdom of Solomon.” The longer works include the superb “Late,” which traces the afterlife of a British academic whose ghost can communicate with one of his students. The smart and cryptic “Oklahoma” is framed as an unfinished autofiction by a dead writer, portraying his disappearance and presumed death and containing clues that suggest he might still be alive. The author draws on magic in “The Musician of Kahani,” a story of wealth and power, about a pregnant musical prodigy who hones her supernatural skills to enact revenge on her exploitive in-laws. Throughout, Rushdie entertains with discursive references to art and cinema, as when the narrator of “Kahani” apologizes to the reader for failing to provide the “twists, complications, danger” of popular Hindi rom-coms. Grounded in moving ruminations on the afterlife and what a person leaves behind, these stories sing. (Nov.)