The Book : This volume brings together ten essays on Midnight's Children (1980) and an interview with Salman Rushdie that discuss this seminal novel from different perspectives. Rushdie's innovative use of history and memory, his experiments with language and narrative mode, the novel's status as the paradigmatic postcolonial text, its inter-textuality and self0reflevivity, the influences on the novel as well as its influence on subsequent novels, the author's relationship with India as an insider-outsider are some of the many issues explored by the critics.

The Editor : Meenakshi Mukherjee is the author of a Realism and Reality : Novel and Society in India (1995), Re-reading Jane Austen (1991) and The Perishabel Emprie (2000). Among volumes edited by her are considerations : Twelve Studies of Indian Writing in English (1977), Rajmohan's Wife (1994) and Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' : A Book of Readings. She has co-edited Narrative : Forms and Transformations (1986), Another India (1990) and Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996). Her latest project, a study of history and fiction will be her first book written in Bangla and is due to appear later this year. Mukherjee has taught in several universities in India and abroad, the largest spell being at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi as Professor of English. At present she is an Honorary Professor, University of Hyderabad.