Pankaj Mishra
Between 1952 and 1957, Naguib Mahfouz did not write any novels or stories. This was not a case of writer’s block. Mahfouz, who had completed his masterwork, The Cairo Trilogy, in the early 1950s, later explained that he had hoped Egypt’s revolutionary regime would fulfil the aims of his realist novels, and focus public attention on social, economic and political ills. Disenchantment would drive him back to fiction, of a more symbolic and allegorical kind. 
A naive beguilement rather than sly irony frames Rushdie’s accounts of hanging out with such very famous people as Jerry Seinfeld and Calista Flockhart. Madonna, narrowly missed at Tina Brown’s immortal launch party for Talk magazine, is finally encountered at Vanity Fair’s Oscars bash in the company of Zadie Smith. At lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Warren Beatty confesses that Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie’s fourth wife, is so beautiful that it makes him “want to faint”. And William Styron’s genitalia are unexpectedly on display one convivial evening at Martha’s Vineyard. 
In the late 1940s, the poet Czesław Miłosz wrote to a Polish friend from the United States: “The spiritual poverty of millions of the inhabitants of this country is horrifying . . . The only living people—the ability to create art is a sign of living—are the Blacks and the Indians.” In contrast to the nation’s beleaguered minorities, it seemed to him, the “unfortunate American puppets move . . . with a depressing inner stupor.” Miłosz was then the cultural attaché of Communist Poland in New York. Within four years he would be persona non grata to the Stalin-installed regime