Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in hiding during his fatwa, in tribute to Messrs Conrad and Chekhov. The second (and brace yourself, because this is going to hurt like pluggery) is that my own literary alter ego, Charlie Croker, has a new book out. Why do writers use pseudonyms, and how does it feel to see a book you’ve written get published with someone else’s name on the cover?
Strictly speaking this isn’t what happened to Rushdie. Joseph Anton was his actual pseudonym rather than his literary one; his fictional books continued to appear under his real name, while his real life was lived under a fictional one. But his recent memoir blurred the lines, being published by Salman Rushdie, titled Joseph Anton, and written in the third rather than the first person.
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