Salman Rushdie: Padma Lakshmi Dumped Me by Email!

To which we say, oh buck up, possum; it might have been worse. She could, for example, have dumped you via text message.

But we have to hand it to her; she's a sly one, that Padma. (Still, we wonder whether telling him by email, rather than in person, was at least in part responsible for his response: issuing a press release and throwing her out of his house.)

At any rate, though the emailed "Dear John" is possibly the most interesting tidbit in the piece published by The New York Times over the weekend, the author of the piece also engages in a little biographical criticism of his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, that is most suggestive:

Beauty and betrayal are both elements of “Enchantress.” “That a woman so beautiful should not be tender, this I did not expect,” says the lover of the mysterious Qara Köz when she leaves him. “I did not expect her to turn away from me so casually, as if she were changing a shoe.”

“I did not expect her to break my heart.”

Even more suggestive is another nugget dug up by Joyce Carol Oates in her review of Enchantress:

She was adept at the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love.... She had marked him with the Three Deep Marks, which were scratches made with the first three fingers of her right hand upon his back, his chest, and on his testicles as well: something to remember her by.... She could perform the Hopping of the Hare, marking the areolas around his nipples without touching him anywhere else on his body. And no living woman was as skilled as she at the Peacock's Foot....

If you are suitably intrigued, then, possums, you should know this, straight from the horse's mouth: “I’m totally eligible, single and available.” So, ladies, start reaching for those nail clippers now.