This fall a new opera called Haroun premiered, based on the book Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. In 1989, Rushdie was forced into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini and declared that his novel The Satanic Verses was heresy against Islam — essentially marking the writer for assassination. Jonathan Mitchell has the story of how Rushdie communicated with his young son through a modern-day fairy tale in which a plucky boy hero has magical adventures, defeats a sorcerer, and restores his father’s ability to write.
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