Salman Rushdie releases ‘Knife,’ a book about his brush with death
At a party last Thursday for Salman Rushdie’s new memoir “Knife," there were none of the usual stacks of books for guests. Graydon Carter, who was hosting the party with his digital publication Air Mail, had received his copy only that morning and hadn’t read it yet. Rushdie’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, let a reporter hold the hardcover for a few seconds.
No reading or signings took place. Nearly as closely guarded as the book was the event itself. There were three security guards stationed around the venue, Carter’s West Village restaurant, the Waverly Inn.
They had been hired from the same company that kept crashers out of the former Vanity Fair editor’s Oscars party. The tightly controlled soiree suited the book’s subject: “Knife," out April 16 with Random House, is the Booker-Prize-winning author’s account of the attempt on his life nearly two years ago during a lecture series in Western New York. A then 24-year-old man, Hadi Matar, ran onstage at the August 2022 event and stabbed Rushdie 15 times in 27 seconds.
Decades earlier, on Valentine’s Day 1989, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination following the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses," based on the book’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Rushdie, who was living in London at the time, went into hiding for about a decade. “I used to fly to London once a month to meet with him in various safe houses," Wylie said of that period.
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