He’s been knighted by Queen Elizabeth, won prestigious awards, and is one of the most famous literary figures of the 20th century, thanks to a fatwa calling for his assassination. So what is Salman Rushdie doing poolside at Las Ventanas al Paraiso, a luxury resort in Los Cabos, Mexico? At the moment, he’s reaching for a complimentary peach sorbet while lounging under a sun umbrella. More generally, he’s here to appear at two dinners and a cocktail reception as part of the Hot Type author series that is sponsored by the resort’s parent company, Rosewood Hotels. He’s not getting paid, but he will receive free food and lodging, along with two first-class roundtrip airline tickets from New York. In short, Sir Salman is here to plug his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence.

Later in the day, Rushdie considers which, if any, public appearances he might turn down. He mentions an invitation to appear on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. “Me and has-been pop stars and Kim Kardashian?” says the 61-year-old novelist. “No, thank you.”

It is a tough time to be in publishing. The industry is in a tailspin, and authors can no longer simply toil at their craft and expect adoring fans to follow. They have to blog, make book-club appearances in people’s homes, and cross-promote at Starbucks.

It is also a tough time to be Salman Rushdie. He is revered around the world as a symbol of courage for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, a work so incendiary that Iran’s spiritual leader issued a death sentence against him. His subsequent books have sold decently and sometimes made national bestseller lists. Yet none have approached the numbers achieved by his breakthrough 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, which won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. Worse, he’s become an easy target; when The Enchantress of Florence didn’t make the Booker Prize short list this fall, the snub was noted on the front page of the New York Times.

These days, the man who famously spent 10 years in hiding derives much of his cachet from appearances in society columns. He is a regular in the party pages of the New York Post, New York magazine, and Women’s Wear Daily. His 2007 divorce from Padma Lakshmi, the model, actress, and Top Chef host 24 years his junior, was heavily chronicled. Since the couple split up, Rushdie is often noticed chatting up or escorting younger women around town. At an April film premiere, it was model Aimee Mullins; at the White House Correspondents’ dinner that same month, it was House actress Olivia Wilde, daughter of journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. Rushdie has even ventured into Hollywood: In Helen Hunt’s 2007 film Then She Found Me, the author played a gynecologist, and in May he could be seen nuzzling actress Scarlett Johansson in a music video from her album of Tom Waits covers.

Rushdie calls that appearance “a crazy fluke.” He explains that ­Johansson and her video director showed up one afternoon at the studio of the Italian painter Francesco Clemente while Rushdie happened to be there, playing his regular game of Ping-Pong. Johansson’s crew persuaded him to join her in a scene. Her cameraman, Rushdie recalls, “kept saying, ‘Lick her face!’ And I said, ‘What?’ And she went, ‘Ew!’ I said, ‘I’m not licking her face. She went, “Ew!”  ’ So it ended up being this kind of little fake nuzzle."

Rushdie certainly isn’t the first man of letters to have an active social life—or to use the attendant A-list connections to help generate press. The glittering nights and dizzying personal affairs of Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Arthur Miller filled the pages of newspapers and magazines of their day. But few of Rushdie’s peers seem to apply such gusto to their hobnobbing and dating opportunities. Instead, novelists like Umberto Eco—whose biggest success, The Name of the Rose, came out a year before Midnight’s Children—seem to content themselves with teaching and an occasional appearance at a book event. “It’s all right for people to have fun,” says Rushdie, defending himself. He dismisses the gossip columns’ obsession with his post-Padma social life as an “occupational hazard.” It not only goes with the territory; it burnishes his image. “Nobody thinks less of Arthur Miller because he was married to Marilyn,” Rushdie says. “They probably think more of him.”