Salman Rushdie has a memoir popping out in regards to the horrifying assault that left him blind in his proper eye and with a broken left hand. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” will probably 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 mentioned in a press release launched Wednesday by Penguin Random Home.
Final August, Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly within the neck and stomach by a person who rushed the stage because the writer was about to provide a lecture in western New York. The attacker, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not responsible to costs of assault and tried homicide.
For a while after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie’s dying over alleged blasphemy in his novel “The Satanic Verses,” the author lived in isolation and with round the clock safety. However for years since, he had moved about with few restrictions, till the stabbing on the Chautauqua Establishment.
The 256-page “Knife” will probably be revealed within the U.S. by Random Home, the Penguin Random Home imprint that earlier this yr launched his novel “Victory City,” accomplished earlier than the assault. His different works embody the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children,” “Shame” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” Rushdie can also be a distinguished advocate without cost 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 Home CEO Nihar Malaviya mentioned in a press release. “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 communicate with The New Yorker about his ordeal, telling interviewer David Remnick for a February difficulty that he had labored onerous to keep away from “recrimination and bitterness” and was decided to “look forward and not backwards.”
He had additionally mentioned that he was struggling to put in writing fiction, as he did within the years instantly following the fatwa, and that he would possibly as a substitute write a memoir. Rushdie wrote at size, and within the third individual, in regards to the fatwa in his 2012 memoir “Joseph Anton.”
“This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie mentioned of the 2022 assault within the journal interview. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”