Last month, authors Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar caused an international controversy. They did so by reading aloud from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The book is banned in India for its controversial portrayal of Muslims, and Rushdie himself had called off a visit to the Jaipur Literary Festival in India when he received death threats. Upon hearing this news, Kunzru and Kumar decided to convert their festival panel into a reading of their favorite passages from The Satanic Verses. What was the response? The two authors were promptly told to leave both the festival and the country. Their show of solidarity–which has been profiled in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and across the Indian press–has prompted campaigns across India to change the censorship laws and left them fighting possibly years of legal battles. See Kunzru’s own essay about the event here.

Please join us in supporting two wonderful writers and Workshop friends, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar, and come celebrate the release of Kunzru’s new novel, Gods Without Men. Named by Granta as one of the top forty British writers under forty, Kunzru is the author of My Revolutions, The Impressionist, and Transmission. His latest novel, Gods Without Men, is an exhilarating “countercultural mind-expanding quest” through a world of extraterrestrial cults and U.S. Marine Corps simulations through the Mojave desert, a landscape of absolute nothing–of God without men.