Rushdie alludes throughout the novel to numerous fictional works, leaving no doubt about the genealogy of The Satanic Verses. The 9th century The Thousand and One Nights continues to be a major influence, especially in the way Gibreel's dreams are presented. The self-consciousness of Sterne and the "magical" realism of Garcia Marquez continue to be in evidence.

But a few writers are acknowledged as influences implicitly or explicitly for the first time. The most prominent of them is Dickens, and English critics have been quick to point out the deliberateness with which Rushdie invokes Our Mutual Friend (1865). In his Newsweek essay, Rushdie also mentions Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790) as one of the formative influences on his effort to fictionalize "the inter-penetration of good and evil." In this same article, Rushdie credits the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967) as the work...