Salman Rushdie
Story Stream
Is Blasphemy Illiberal? September 10, 2024
We tend to think of blasphemy—an offense against God—as a relic of an antique past. It seems to belong to times and places where religion and law speak with one voice. And a stern one: in Leviticus, God tells the Israelites that “he that blasphemeth ...
Salman Rushdie’s Beautiful Revenge June 21, 2024
There’s a story in the Talmud about a rabbi, Elazar Ben Durdaya, who loved nothing more than whoring. He’d spend every shekel he had frequenting the finest ladies on offer, and so when he heard one day that a new pro had set up shop in some distant t...
Martin Amis and the Pursuit of Pleasure June 13, 2024
On 10 June, a year after the death of his friend Martin Amis, Ian McEwan stood in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields church, off Trafalgar Square, reeling off his favourite lines for hundreds of Amis’s admirers. The narrator of the novel Money, f...
The Pen Was Mightier June 10, 2024
On August 12, 2022, a man tried to kill Salman Rushdie. As the author prepared to deliver a talk in Chautauqua, N.Y.—on, ironically enough, the importance of keeping writers safe from harm—his assailant leapt up from the audience, ran on stage toward...
Unbowed but Gravely Wounded June 04, 2024
My copy of Salman Rushdie’s new book, Knife, arrived a few weeks ago, and before I had even opened the package, the news also arrived that Paul Auster had succumbed to cancer—and the confluence of Rushdie’s book and the information about Auster hit m...
Words and Weapons May 21, 2024
Sir Salman Rushdie is first and foremost a novelist, a creator of fiction, an artist. He is brilliant at it and, deservedly, much decorated. His fifteen published novels have been translated into dozens of languages, won the world’s most glittering l...
How Rushdie Reckoned With an Unthinkable Attack May 21, 2024
In the mid-1990s, when I was still a bookish teenager, my parents took me to Paris. It was the end of December; we would, before the trip was done, spend New Year’s Eve on the Champs Élysées—I was not yet old enough or self-snobbified enough to think...
Salman Rushdie Writes Back May 13, 2024
When novelist Salman Rushdie appeared August 12, 2022, in upstate New York at the Chautauqua Institution, he intended to speak on the subject of safety for writers and other public voices. He was already an object lesson. After Ayatollah Ruhollah Kho...
Remembering the Postmodern Paul Auster May 03, 2024
In Salman Rushdie’s new memoir Knife, there is a powerful and moving moment — amid the many other powerful and moving moments — in which Rushdie visits his ailing friend Paul Auster at the latter’s house in Brooklyn and describes his sorrow at seeing...
Who Saved Salman Rushdie? April 23, 2024
In his new memoir, Salman Rushdie describes the moment he glimpsed his would-be murderer closing in on him. “My eyes follow the running man as he leaps out of the audience and approaches me,” he writes in Knife. Rushdie, then 75, had just taken the s...
A Byword for Resistance April 22, 2024
The history of literature is strewn with vain and irascible men who could have used a great comeuppance. Remarkably, no one stabbed D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Norman Mailer (who himself punctured his second wife), or Gore Vidal. In ...
Rushdie’s Triumph April 22, 2024
The year 1989 was a pivotal one in the spread of freedom. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, the electoral victory of the Solidarity trade union in Poland, the collapse of the Berlin Wall—all helped bring about the peaceful disintegration of the Sov...
Salman Rushdie Parties Again April 17, 2024
A few minutes before Salman Rushdie’s book party begins, his longtime literary agent, Andrew Wylie, is sitting at a table outside the Waverly Inn with a Hoyo de Monterrey Cuban cigar between his teeth. He’s holding what might be the event’s only phys...
Salman Rushdie Strikes Back April 17, 2024
Salman Rushdie tells us that he wrote Knife, his account of his near-murder at the hands of a 24-year-old Shia Muslim man from New Jersey, for two reasons: because he had to deal with “the elephant-in-the-room” before he could return to writing about...
Rushdie on Peace, 'Barbie' and What Freedom Cost Him November 10, 2023
To begin with, let me tell you a story. There were once two jackals: Karataka, whose name meant Cautious, and Damanaka, whose name meant Daring. They were in the second rank of the retinue of the lion king Pingalaka, but they were ambitious and cunni...
The Death of the Literary Feud September 25, 2023
We live in a culture defined by public confrontation: the age of the Twitter spat, the diss track and the celebrity cage fight. Demand for an undignified scrap is at an all-time high. The literary world has enjoyed a distinguished tradition of disgra...
