"Rushdie fears that writers no longer trust their imaginations, and that the classroom imperative to 'write what you know' has led to dullness, angst and dead ends: cold and bony literary mumblecore."

"There is nothing ordinary about ordinary life, Rushdie writes. Behind closed doors, family existence is 'overblown and operatic and monstrous and almost too much to bear; there are mad grandfathers in there, and wicked aunts and corrupt brothers and nymphomaniac sisters.' He praises the 'giant belchers' and 'breakers of giant winds.' He sees himself as a maximalist in a minimalist world; a wet writer in a dry one; a lover of bric-a-brac in an era of Shaker modesty.... I read Rushdie’s arguments with much interest and little agreement, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used to say. He is fencing with a poorly stuffed straw man. For one thing, there have been autobiographical novels — 'David Copperfield' is one — since the form was invented. And if there has been a boomlet in autofiction, it is surely in part an attempt by writers to claw back breathing space from the culture-strangling juggernauts that are Marvel movies and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe and George R.R. Martin’s 'Game of Thrones.' Fantasy has quite won over America, in nearly every sphere. What’s more, contra Rushdie, we’re in a fat period for deep and sustained invention in literary fiction. Two examples: Among the most revered and popular novels of the past decade are Colson Whitehead’s 'The Underground Railroad' and George Saunders’s 'Lincoln in the Bardo.' In the first, the metaphorical underground railroad becomes an actual underground railroad. The second is a garrulous ghost story, reality as seen through the eyes of people stuck in an intermediate state between death and rebirth. No lukewarm autobiography here...."

From "In ‘Languages of Truth,’ Salman Rushdie Defends the Extraordinary," a book review by Dwight Garner (NYT).

ADDED: For balance, there's an essay by Salman Rushdie in the current NYT — "Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love" — an essay adapted from the book Garner is reviewing.

The stories that made me fall in love with literature in the first place were tales full of beautiful impossibility, which were not true but by being not true told the truth, often more beautifully and memorably than stories that relied on being true....

Only by unleashing the fictionality of fiction, the imaginativeness of the imagination, the dream songs of our dreams, can we hope to approach the new, and to create fiction that may, once again, be more interesting than the facts.

The fantastic is neither innocent nor escapist. The wonderland is not a place of refuge, not even necessarily an attractive or likable place. It can be — in fact, it usually is — a place of slaughter, exploitation, cruelty and fear. Captain Hook wants to kill Peter Pan. The witch in the Black Forest wants to cook Hansel and Gretel. The wolf actually eats Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Albus Dumbledore is murdered, and the Lord of the Rings plans the enslavement of the whole of Middle-earth....

The wonder tale tells us truths about ourselves that are often unpalatable; it exposes bigotry, explores the libido, brings our deepest fears to light....