Salman Rushdie Is Once more the Toast of Literary Manhattan
Three safety guards stood alongside a leafy road within the West Village of Manhattan on Thursday night, watching as a procession of writers, editors and publishing trade veterans entered the Waverly Inn restaurant for a e book celebration.
The safety staff was current as a result of this wasn’t simply any e book celebration.
It was a gathering for the discharge of “Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide,” a brand new memoir by Salman Rushdie, wherein he examines how his life was altered by a violent stabbing almost two years in the past, when he was attacked onstage on the Chautauqua Establishment in western New York.
The episode briefly positioned Mr. Rushdie on a ventilator and left him blind in his proper eye. (The suspect, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not responsible to costs of tried homicide and assault.)
When Mr. Rushdie, 76, arrived within the Waverly Inn’s backyard, pals and fellow writers hugged him. He wore a pink shirt, a blazer and a pair of eyeglasses with a black-tinted proper lens. His spouse, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, stood at his aspect.
The room crammed with literary energy gamers, together with the agent Andrew Wylie, the author Marlon James and the editor Graydon Carter, whose digital publication, Air Mail, hosted the occasion.
The actor and singer Tony Danza was additionally there for Mr. Rushdie.
“The writing course of is catharsis,” Mr. Danza stated. “If Salman is utilizing this e book to course of the horrible factor that occurred to him, that takes guts.”
The memoir is below a strict embargo, so there have been no copies of the e book on the celebration. And since Anderson Cooper has carried out an interview with Mr. Rushdie set to air on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, he wasn’t fielding many questions from journalists. However he did take a second to explain why he had determined to write down a memoir within the wake of the assault, relatively than one other novel.
“Nicely, I attempted to write down different issues afterward, however they have been all nonsense,” Mr. Rushdie stated. “So I made a decision that I lastly had to concentrate to the elephant within the room.”
The try on his life got here greater than three a long time after the chief of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Mr. Rushdie’s demise after the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which fictionalized components of the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad and included depictions that many Muslims thought-about blasphemous. Main e book chains refused to inventory the e book for a time, and Mr. Rushdie lived in hiding for almost a decade.
On the celebration, Homosexual Talese recalled how, after the fatwa was issued in 1989, writers together with himself, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag participated in a PEN America public studying of alternatives from “The Satanic Verses” to assist him.
“Me and Mailer and Sontag, we questioned if we have been going to be shot,” Mr. Talese stated. “The query was whether or not there can be somebody within the viewers who would avenge additional for the Ayatollah.”
“Thirty years of being a marked man of letters, are you able to think about dwelling like that?” Mr. Talese added. “I’d solely hope to have the identical type of grace that Salman has dwelling with such a circumstance. For a person with such tragedy and disturbance in his life, he’s nonetheless such a cheerful man.”
Certainly, because the e book celebration received going, Mr. Rushdie appeared in contact along with his internal social butterfly. Whereas he made the rounds, friends commented on how his latest trauma hadn’t diminished his repute as a social literary lion.
Nursing a margarita with a salted rim, the creator Gary Shteyngart stated that Mr. Rushdie appeared undaunted. “Anytime you go to an excellent celebration now, there he’s, nonetheless on the market, and God bless him for that,” he stated. “It’s an enormous screw you to anybody on the market who would think about doing one thing to him.”
Molly Jong-Quick, the author and political commentator, reminisced about encountering Mr. Rushdie whereas out and about in London years in the past.
“I keep in mind being at events as a teen in London within the Nineteen Nineties, and I’d all the time see him, and I’d suppose, ‘Wait, doesn’t half the world need to kill this man proper now?’” Ms. Jong-Quick stated. “I all the time thought he was a badass.”
The room grew rowdier because the night progressed, resembling the gin-soaked Manhattan e book events of previous, minus the cigarette smoke. Amid the group have been additionally younger stars of the town’s literary scene, like Kiara Barrow, a cofounding editor of The Drift, and Karah Preiss, who began the Instagram e book membership Belletrist with Emma Roberts.
When the celebration lastly died down, friends headed out right into a nighttime drizzle. Mr. Rushdie stayed behind to have dinner with pals. His safety staff saved watch whereas they ate in an adjoining crimson leather-based sales space.
The author Sloane Crosley, a longtime good friend of Mr. Rushdie, stated that she was glad to see him in such good kind. However she remembered when his well being appeared extra precarious months after the assault, throughout an intimate gathering celebrating the discharge of his novel “Victory Metropolis.”
“I noticed him when he made this look not that lengthy after all of it occurred, however even then he nonetheless had his wit and style,” Ms. Crosley stated. “I went as much as hug him, however I used to be nervous, and I didn’t need to squeeze him too onerous. I keep in mind he informed me, ‘What’s the purpose of all of it if you happen to can’t squeeze too onerous?’”
