NEW YORK – Salman Rushdie has a memoir popping out about the horrifying attack that left him blind in his proper eye and with a broken left hand. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” can be revealed April 16.
“This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” Rushdie stated in a observation launched Wednesday by way of Penguin Random House.
Last August, Rushdie was stabbed time and again in the neck and stomach by way of a guy who rushed the stage as the creator was about to offer a lecture in western New York. The attacker, Hadi Matar, has pleaded no longer responsible to charges of assault and attempted murder.
For a while after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie’s loss of life over alleged blasphemy in his novel “The Satanic Verses,” the creator lived in isolation and with round-the-clock safety. But for years since, he had moved about with few restrictions, till the stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution.
The 256-page “Knife” will be published in the U.S. by Random House, the Penguin Random House imprint that earlier this year released his novel “Victory City,” finished prior to the attack. His different works come with the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children,” “Shame” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” Rushdie may be a outstanding advocate for free expression and a former president of PEN America.
“’Knife’ is a searing book, and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement. “We are honored to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves.”
Rushdie, 76, did discuss with The New Yorker about his ordeal, telling interviewer David Remnick for a February issue that he had worked hard to avoid “recrimination and bitterness” and was determined to “look forward and not backwards.”
He had also said that he was struggling to write fiction, as he did in the years immediately following the fatwa, and that he might instead write a memoir. Rushdie wrote at length, and in the third person, about the fatwa in his 2012 memoir “Joseph Anton.”
“This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie stated of the 2022 attack in the mag interview. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”