The author Salman Rushdie has set his books all over the world. His most famous novels — Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses — take place in India and the United Kingom, both countries where Rushdie has lived. His latest, The Golden House , is set in the city he now calls home, New York, and its themes are deeply American. There's a moment when one character says, "Your country is young — one thinks differently when one has millennia behind one; you have not even 250 years." Does that youthfulness shape Rushdie's view of the U.S.? "It's a very interesting thing," he says, "having been brought up in one very ancient country, India, and then having lived in a kind of reasonably old country, England, and then to come to a new country. They all have their slightly different characteristics." Interview Highlights On the youthfulness of the United States It's just the weight of history — America clearly has some very heavy, and even dark aspects to its history. But it's not like
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