Salman Rushdie is taking his fiction to Substack.
The author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses plans to serialize a novella titled The Seventh Wave on the newsletter platform, Publishers Weekly reports. The newsletter, called Salman’s Sea of Stories, will also feature new short stories and essays by the author.
“I got very attracted to the idea recently, in this strange year and a half, of trying out things I’ve never done before,” Rushdie told the Guardian. “I just thought: do something else. And exactly the moment I was thinking that, this project cropped up.”
Rushdie said his decision to start a Substack newsletter was influenced by authors Etgar Keret and Patti Smith, both of whom have joined the platform.
The initial newsletters will be free, Rushdie told the New York Times, but he’ll eventually charge a few dollars a month to access some of the fiction and essays. He plans to write nonfiction about some of his longtime interests, including music and cinema (he’s a fan of French New Wave films in particular).
On the webpage for his newsletter, Rushdie said he plans to “talk about all sorts of stories.”
“The point of doing this is to have a closer relationship with readers, to speak freely, without any intermediaries or gatekeepers,” he wrote. “There’s just us here, just you and me, and we can take this wherever it goes. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride. I’ll try to make it fun.”
Rushdie’s most recent book, an essay collection titled Languages of Truth, was published in May.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
