Salman Rushdie is best known for his fifth book, The Satanic Verses, which prompted a fatwa against him in 1989 and forced him into seclusion.  Imaginary Homelands is an important record of the writer's intellectual and personal odyssey.  The 75  essays collected here cover an astonishing range of subjects - the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, religious fundamentalism, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.