Some duds ("Yorick," "Columbus,") but most of these stories show that Rushdie could have a solid career as a short-story writer if he wants to give up the novels. As the stories stretch out, they do get better; "Chekov and Zulu" is quietly tragic and the line in "The Courter" about his mother and grandmother getting robbed by the Beatles is loudly funny. Overall the "East, West" stories are the best, the "West" stories aren't generally as good, and the "East" stories fall somewhere in the middle, which all makes intuitive sense.