Author Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for his assassination in 1989, declaring Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” blasphemous and an insult to Islam. After 10 years Rushdie came out of hiding and moved to the United States, where he felt safe. Then, on Aug. 12, 2022, at a literary event in Chautauqua, New York, he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Rushdie was stabbed 15 times and nearly died. He lost his right eye in the attack. He has come to terms with the attempt on his life the only way he knows: by writing about it in his book. “Knife,” which was published in April 2024.
Rushdie read several excerpts from “Knife” for 60 Minutes.
“I would answer violence with art,” says author Salman Rushdie. He initially didn’t want to write his book “Knife” about the attack, but he felt he needed to own what happened, refusing to be a victim.
“No matter what I’ve already written or may now write, I’ll always be the guy who got knifed. The knife defines me. I’ll fight a battle against that, but I suspect I will lose,” he writes.
“There was nothing supernatural about it. No ‘tunnel of light.’ No feeling of rising out of my body,” writes Rushdie, describing his near-death experience in 2022 in his book. “In fact, I have rarely felt so strongly connected to my body. My body was dying, and it was taking me with it.”
“I do not want to use his name in this account,” the author writes of his 24-year-old assailant. In “Knife” Rushdie refers to the attacker as “the A.” After the attack, he learned the assailant had only read a couple of pages from his book, “The Satanic Verses,” according to the New York Post.
“So it’s you. Here you are.” Those were Rushdie’s first thoughts as a man with a knife rushed towards him before stabbing him.
“It is said that Henry James’s last words were ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ Death was coming at me, too, but it didn’t strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic,” says Rushdie.
While talking with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper, Rushdie explained: “It felt like something coming out of the distant past. And trying to drag me back in time.”
“There was the knife in the eye. That was the cruellest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there would be no possibility of saving the vision. It was gone,” writes Rushdie.
After being stabbed 15 times, Salman Rushdie’s face was slashed open. In his book “Knife,” he writes his face looked like “a sci-fi movie special effect.” He describes his eye as bulging out of its socket and hanging down on his face like a large soft-boiled egg. He writes: “the swelling was so bad that the doctors didn’t even know, in those first days, if I still had an eyelid. (I did.)”
In the days after the attack, he didn’t recognize his own reflection. “The lips of the man in the mirror do not move. There is a slash across the top of his forehead,” Rushdie writes. “Now he is the man beyond the mirror and the mirror is behind him and dark. He is the stranger who has to play his part.”
When Salman Rushdie contemplated testifying in court against his assailant, he imagined what he would say: “I find I have very little to say to you. Our lives touched each other for an instant and then separated. Mine has improved since that day, while yours has deteriorated. You made a bad gamble and lost.”
“The last thing my right eye would ever see: I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low,” writes Rushdie in his book, “Knife.” “I didn’t try to run. I was transfixed.”
In May 2025, Salman Rushdie’s attacker was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The videos above were originally published on April 14, 2024.
The Friend’s House Is Here was covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
There is a scene about halfway through first-time writer-director Stephanie Ahn’s romantic drama Bedford Park—which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition in last week’s Sundance Film Festival—where the lead characters are stuck in New Jersey traffic, fiddling with the radio. “Keep it here,” says reluctant passenger Eli (South Korean actor Son Suk-ku) when he hears Bill Conti’s Rocky theme Gonna Fly Now. While Eli—whose cauliflower ears speak to his high school wrestling days and whose furtive and combative manner suggests he has never stopped fighting—bobs his head and shakes his fists, Irene (a devastating Moon Choi), an on-leave physical therapist in an emotional free fall, stares ahead, saying nothing, her eyes silently filling with tears.
Sitting in a Press & Industry screening at the Holiday Village Theaters in Park City, so did mine. Of course, it had much to do with the authenticity and masterfully observational patience of Ahn’s film. But the film served as a powerful metaphor for the festival itself, which was also uniting a bunch of broken people around their shared and largely nostalgic love of movies. A dense cloud of wistfulness threatened to overtake the festival every time audiences watched Robert Redford, its late founder and spiritual guide, reflect on the power of storytelling in gauzy footage projected onscreen.
While Bedford Park was my favorite film I saw at the festival, it didn’t pick up one of the big awards. (Beth de Araújo’s Channing Tatum–starring drama about an 8-year-old crime witness Josephine swept both the Jury and Audience awards, while Bedford Park received a Special Jury Award for Debut Feature.)
What Ahn’s film brought home instead was something even more valuable: a distribution deal. Sony Pictures Classics—whose co-presidents and founders Michael Barker and Tom Bernard were battling for good movies and ethical distribution against the indie movie dark lord Harvey Weinstein back in Sundance’s buy-happy ’90s heyday—made the film its second acquisition of the festival behind director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s crowd-pleasing Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! It was an anachronistically bullish stand by the 34-year-old specialty arm in what has been a largely bearish acquisition market.
The relatively quiet marketplace, Redford’s passing and the immutability of 2026 being the end of the festival’s Utah run (Main Street’s iconic Egyptian Theater being unavailable for festival programming felt like a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you statement from both city and state) combined to give this outing a bit of a Dance of Death feeling. Respite from this sense of gloom came from the most unlikely of places: documentaries on seemingly depressing topics.
Joybubbles in his living room. Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Joybubbles, the effervescent directorial debut from longtime archival producer Rachael J. Morrison, tells the story of Joe Engrassia, a man who copes with his blindness and the cruelty he experiences as a result of his visual impairment through his relationship with that great relic of the 20th Century: the telephone. As a child, he found comfort in its steady tone when his parents fought; as a young man, he learned to manipulate its system to make calls across the world with his pitch-perfect whistling; as an adult, he entertains strangers through a prerecorded “fun line,” telling jokes and stories from his life. In one scene, Morrison captures a caller recollecting taking Joe—who late in life legally changed his name to Joybubbles to reflect his commitment to living life as a child—to Penny Marshall’s 1988 movie Big, and describing it to him in the back of the theater; the moment moved me as deeply as the Rocky interlude from Bedford Park.
The setup of Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World seems high concept: a globe-spanning chronicle of the various holders of that dubious Guinness World Record title over the course of a decade. But in the hands of Green, a Sundance vet who has premiered a dozen films at the festival dating back to 1997, what would be rote instead blossoms into a consistently surprising, deeply personal and strangely exhilarating exploration of what it means to be alive.
Ghost in the Machine delivers a thought-provoking takedown of Techno-Fascism. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Ghost in the Machine,Valerie Vatach’s exploration of the eugenicist roots and colonial and anti-environmental reality of the A.I. arms race, had the exact opposite effect. It tells the tale of a society that has lost its moral and humanitarian bearing at the behest of techno-oligarchs, amalgamating our own labor to keep us divided. The film’s denouement—showing ways we as a society can still fight back—was the only unconvincing part of Vatach’s film essay.
Meanwhile, the miles-deep societal pessimism of Ghost in the Machine was being tragically echoed by real events. Indeed, the most shocking and vital clip of the weekend was the footage of the Minneapolis murder of protester and ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents that festivalgoers watched on their phones in stunned silence while waiting in lines. A day earlier, U.S. Congressman Max Frost was physically assaulted at the festival in an attack that was both politically and racially motivated.
It all made for a tense mood for one of the more anxious events of the festival: that Sunday’s premiere of Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, from Alex Gibney, another longtime Sundance veteran. Culled from footage shot by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Rushdie’s wife) of the novelist’s recovery from the 2022 attack on his life and adapted from his memoir of that event, the film was most effective when Gibney recounted the since-rescinded 1989 fatwa against Rushdie, an example of, as the author told the theater audience, “how violence unleashed by an irresponsible leader can spread out of control.” (Security measures for the event included a full pat-down, metal detectors, and bomb-sniffing dogs.)
As trenchant as it felt in that moment, Knife was also an example of a documentary where the subject may have been a bit too in control of the final product; in addition to providing the footage, Griffiths served as executive producer and Gibney was her and Rushdie’s handpicked director.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition and took home the Audience Award, also drifted toward hagiography. But in telling the story of Valdez, the Chicano arts trailblazer who founded El Teatro Campesino to inform and entertain newly unionized farmworkers, the film powerfully demonstrates how politically and socially engaged arts serve both as a morale booster and a clarion call in the fight against oppression.
Nowhere was this idea better expressed than in my second favorite fiction film in the festival: The Friend’s House Is Here. Directed by the New York–based husband and wife team of Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei and covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens, House is at its heart a joyful “hangout” movie about two close but very different friends pushing the limits of their creative expression in current-day Iran. The film—whose cast includes Iranian Instagram star Hana Mana, theater actor Mahshad Bahraminejad, and a troupe of actors from a local improvisational theater company—rightfully took home the Special Jury Award for its ensemble cast.
Maria Petrova in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Aside from The Friend’s House Is Here crew, the best performances in Sundance films were given by children. This includes Maria Petrova as a dour 11-year-old beach rat reconnecting with her estranged conman father in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me, which won the World Cinema-Dramatic Audience Award. Mason Reeves’ complex and nervy turn as an 8-year-old who witnesses a rape in Golden Gate Park during an early morning run with her fitness-obsessed dad (Channing Tatum) is by far the best thing about Josephine, writer-director Beth de Araújo’s multiple award winner; the film’s narrative and emotional force are deeply undercut by the abject cluelessness shown by the child’s parents, played by Channing Tatum and Eternals stunner Gemma Chan.
Not all of the films at this year’s festival were engaged with our fraught political moment. Longtime Sundance mainstay Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (the programmers’ fixation on inviting old hands felt like a combination of sentimentality and branding) was born of the kind of sassy, candy-colored provocations the director helped pioneer in the 90s in its telling of Cooper Hoffman’s art intern embarking on a Dom/Sub relationship with his boss, played with preening relish by Olivia Wilde.
Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Lacey Terrell
Along with her Sex costar Charli XCX, whose premiere of her mockumentary The Moment created the closest thing the 2026 fest had to a media scrum, Wilde became the celebrity face of the festival. The bidding war to acquire The Invite—the middle-age sex comedy she directed and stars in alongside Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz—was eventually won by A24 and provided one of the few pieces of red meat that kept the trade reporters engaged.
Otherwise, the festival overall seemed much more focused on its past than its present or even its future. (That said, Colorado Governor Jared Polis showing up to premieres in his trademark cowboy hat—in anticipation of Sundance’s move next year to Boulder—did feel like the ultimate Rocky Mountain flex.)
In addition to its reliance on programming new films by filmmakers who had movies in previous festivals, this year’s festival also featured special screenings of films from its illustrious past, among them Barbara Kopple’s American Dream,Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, and James Wan’s Saw. Still, the festival’s most potent dose of uncut nostalgia was Tamra Davis’ The Best Summer. A stitched-together chronicle of a 1994 Australian indie rock festival that featured the Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Pavement, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth, Davis’ film felt like the ultimate in Gen X hipster home movies.
But did all of this chronic looking backwards sap the festival of its vitality? Maybe a little. But despite the sentimentality that covered Park City more heartily than the snow, films like The Friend’s House Is Here reminded us how remarkable good films can be at discovering and celebrating humanity, even as Ghost in the Machine showed us that the moment to do something about it may have passed.
The Dia Art Foundation’s annual Fall Night was a celebration of Melvin Edwards and Meg Webster. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
For more than half a century, Dia Art Foundation has redefined how art can be supported, exhibited and preserved—particularly when it comes to large-scale, long-term, or site-specific works that fall outside the confines of traditional museums and commercial galleries. On Monday (Nov. 3), its annual Fall Night once again celebrated that mission with an elegant dinner that drew a remarkable number of artists—far more than most New York institutions can claim—reminding everyone that artists remain firmly at the center of Dia’s vision.
The evening began with a cocktail reception and exhibition viewing at Dia Chelsea, where guests admired 12 + 2—Duane Linklater’s first major U.S. commission. His monumental clay animal forms inhabited the space, evoking a primal connection to matter. These gigantic creatures seemed to emerge from an elemental prehistory, before and beyond civilization’s structural and rational constraints. In one of the rooms, a circular wall relief of swirling clay channeled a sense of cosmic gesture—an improvised cosmology unfolding in earthy motion, connecting the microcosm of human making with the broader entropic order that regulates all forces between energy and matter.
The galleries at Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, were open to guests for a special viewing of an exhibition of work by Duane Linklater. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Guests then moved to 547 West 26th Street, where long, white linen-decked tables awaited. Dinner began with welcoming remarks from Nathalie de Gunzburg, chair of Dia’s board. Next, a radiant Jessica Morgan, Dia’s director, then took the dais. “Paris was a blast,” she said, beginning her speech with genuine enthusiasm following her just-concluded art week abroad, where she opened “Minimal” at La Bourse de Commerce in Paris. The show, a collaboration between the Pinault Collection and Dia, brought part of Dia’s holdings to Europe for the first time, pairing them with a rarely seen selection of works from the French magnate’s collection. The show celebrated the aesthetics and philosophy of Minimalism while tracing its global evolution and enduring influence.
The night’s honorees, Melvin Edwards and Meg Webster, both hold deep significance for Dia. Their concurrent presentations Upstate spotlight how each pioneering practice anticipated many of today’s most urgent artistic concerns. Artist Sanford Biggers delivered a heartfelt tribute to Edwards, reflecting on their shared Houston roots and the profound emotional and artistic bond between them. His remarks captured how Edwards has imbued the rigorous formalism of his welded metal assemblage—steel, chain, barbed wire, machine parts—with a uniquely human and political charge: abstract forms that pulse with the weight of history and memory, between oppression and liberation.
Next, architect Steven Holl paid homage to Webster, tracing how her practice infused Land Art and process-based sculpture with a prescient ecological consciousness. Merging nature and culture, matter and energy, her works embrace the entropic principle of impermanence and transformation while prompting reflection on sustainability and humanity’s relationship with the earth. Webster’s art—poised between the elemental and the formal, the human-shaped and the naturally evolving—feels particularly timely today, as she enjoys a long-overdue moment in the international spotlight, from Dia’s Beacon presentation to her installations currently on view in the frescoed rotunda of La Bourse de Commerce.
And of course, no Dia gathering would be complete without members of the gallery world who have long supported the foundation’s mission: Paula Cooper, Lucas Cooper, Arne Glimcher, Alexander Gray, Carol Greene, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, José Kuri, Dominique Lévy, Alex Logsdail, Siniša Mačković, Ales Ortuzar, Sukanya Rajaratnam, Thaddaeus Ropac, Almine Rech-Picasso and Kara Vander Weg were all among the evening’s guests. Below, we offer a glimpse into the night’s most memorable moments.
Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg and Marina Abramović
Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg and Marina Abramović. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Dominique Lévy and Sanford Biggers
Dominique Lévy and Sanford Biggers. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Steven Holl
Steven Holl. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Meg Webster
Meg Webster. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Howardena Pindell and Ann Temkin
Howardena Pindell and Ann Temkin. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Amy Astley
Amy Astley. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Molly Epstein and Hugh Hayden
Molly Epstein and Hugh Hayden. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Nicolas Party
Nicolas Party. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman and Lucas Cooper
Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman and Lucas Cooper. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Axel Rüger, Cathy Ho Lee and Scott Rothkopf
Axel Rüger, Cathy Ho Lee and Scott Rothkopf. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso
Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Scott Rothkopf and Shelley Fox Aarons
Scott Rothkopf and Shelley Fox Aarons. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti and Charles de Gunzburg
Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti and Charles de Gunzburg. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley and Sukanya Rajaratnam
Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley and Sukanya Rajaratnam. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Li Xin and Thaddaeus Ropac
Li Xin and Thaddaeus Ropac. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Akio Tagawa and Karen LaGatta
Akio Tagawa and Karen LaGatta. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Sarah Gavlak
Sarah Gavlak. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
David Israel, Maynard Monrow and Julie Hillman
David Israel, Maynard Monrow and Julie Hillman. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Joost Elffers and Pat Steir
Joost Elffers and Pat Steir. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
William T. Williams and Alexander Gray
William T. Williams and Alexander Gray. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Paul Richert-Garcia, David Lewis and Barry X Ball
Paul Richert-Garcia, David Lewis and Barry X Ball. Bre Johnson/BFA.com
Dana Lee and Heather Harmon
Dana Lee and Heather Harmon. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Vanessa Yoa and Brandon Chen
Vanessa Yoa and Brandon Chen. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Maynard Monrow and Stephanie Ingrassia
Maynard Monrow and Stephanie Ingrassia. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor and Jillian Brodie
Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor and Jillian Brodie. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
Tehching Hsieh and Hiroyuki Maki
Tehching Hsieh and Hiroyuki Maki. Madison McGaw/BFA.com
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“The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories” (to be published Tuesday by Random House) is acclaimed novelist Salman Rushie’s elegiac new collection of stories – his first fiction since a 2022 attack that nearly killed him – in which he writes of intimate encounters with death, ghosts, magic, and the immutable passage of time.
Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Martha Teichner’s conversation with Salman Rushdie on “CBS Sunday Morning” November 2!
Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.
From “In the South”
The day Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising up from the floor below, the pelvic thrusts of an “item number” dancing across a neighbor’s TV; a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree. Senior and Junior, two very old men, opened their eyes in their bedrooms on the fourth floor of a sea-green building on a leafy lane, just out of sight of Elliot’s Beach, where, that evening, the young would congregate, as they always did, to perform the rites of youth, not far from the village of the fisherfolk, who had no time for such frivolity. The poor were puritans by night and day. As for the old, they had rites of their own and did not need to wait for evening. With the sun stabbing at them through their window blinds, the two old men struggled to their feet and lurched out onto their adjacent verandas, emerging at the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in fateful coincidences, unable to escape the consequences of chance.
Almost at once they began to speak. Their words were not new. These were ritual speeches, obeisances to the new day, offered in call-and-response format, like the rhythmic dialogues or “duels” of the virtuosi of Carnatic music during the annual December festival.
“Be thankful we are men of the south,” said Junior, stretching and yawning. “Southerners are we, in the south of our city in the south of our country in the south of our continent. God be praised. We are warm, slow, and sensual guys, not like the cold fishes of the north.”
Senior, scratching first his belly and then the back of his neck, contradicted him at once. “In the first place,” he said, “the south is a fiction, existing only because men have agreed to call it that. Suppose men had imagined the earth the other way up! We would be the northerners then. The universe does not understand up and down; neither does a dog. To a dog there is no north and south. And in the second place, you’re not that warm a character, and a woman would laugh to hear you call yourself sensual—but you are slow, that is beyond a doubt.”
This was how they were: they fought, going at each other like ancient wrestlers whose left feet were tied together at the ankles. The rope that bound them so tightly was their name. By a curious chance—which they had come to think of as “destiny,” or, as they more often called it, a “curse”—they shared a name, a long name like so many names of the south, a name neither of them cared to speak. By banishing the name, by reducing it to its initial letter, V., they made the rope invisible, which did not mean it did not exist. They echoed each other in other ways—their voices were high, they were of similarly wiry build and medium height, they were both nearsighted, and, after lifetimes of priding themselves on the quality of their teeth, they had both surrendered to the humiliating inevitability of dentures—but it was the unused name, that symmetrical V., the Name That Could Not Be Spoken, that had joined them together for decades.
The two old men did not share a birthday, however. One was seventeen days older than the other. That must have been how “Senior” and “Junior” got started, even though the nicknames had been in use for so long that nobody could now remember who originally thought them up. V. Senior and Junior they had become, Junior V. and Senior V. forevermore, quarreling to the death. They were eighty-one years old. If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.
“You look terrible,” Junior told Senior, as he did every morning. “You look like a man who is only waiting to die.”
Senior—nodding gravely, and also speaking in accordance with their private tradition—responded, “That is better than looking, as you do, like a man who is still waiting to live.”
Salman Rushdie has come to terms with the attempt on his life the only way he knows: by writing about it in his new book. He details the experience in his first television interview since the attack.
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Facing widespread unhappiness over its response to the Israel-Hamas war, the writers’ group PEN America has called off its annual awards ceremony. Dozens of nominees had dropped out of the event, which was to have taken place next week.
PEN, a literary and free expression organization, hands out hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes each year, including $75,000 for the PEN/Jean Stein Award for best book. But with nine of the 10 Jean Stein finalists withdrawing, along with nominees in categories ranging from translation to poetry, continuing with the ceremony at The Town Hall in Manhattan proved unworkable.
Among those dropping out was debut novel finalist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, wife of former PEN president Salman Rushdie.
“This is a beloved event and an enormous amount of work goes into it, so we all regret this outcome but ultimately concluded it was not possible to carry out a celebration in the way we had hoped and planned,” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement Monday.
The cancellation comes as tensions over the war have spread throughout the country, from college campuses to political events to roadways, which at times have been blocked by protesters everywhere from Illinois to California.
Since the war began last October, authors affiliated with PEN have repeatedly denounced the organization for allegedly favoring Israel and downplaying atrocities against Palestinian writers and journalists. In an open letter published last month, and endorsed by Naomi Klein and Lorrie Moore among others, the signers criticized PEN for not mobilizing “any substantial coordinated support” for Palestinians and for not upholding its mission to “dispel all hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace and equality in one world.”
PEN has responded by citing that it has condemned the loss of life in Gaza, called for a ceasefire and helped set up a $100,000 emergency fund for Palestinian writers. Last week, PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan announced that a committee was being formed to review the organization’s work, “not just over the last six months, but indeed, going back a decade, to ensure we are aligned with our mission and make recommendations about how we respond to future conflicts.”
Critics have said that the relief fund is too small and noted that PEN waited until March to endorse a ceasefire, five months after the war began.
Stein finalists had included Justin Torres’ “Blackouts,” winner last fall of the National Book Award for fiction, and Catherine Lacey’s “Biography of X.” At the request of the estate for Jean Stein, an author and oral historian who died in 2017, the prize money will be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
“Jean Stein was a passionate advocate for Palestinian rights who published, supported, and celebrated Palestinian writers and visual artists,” reads a statement from Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Wendy Vanden Heuvel and Bill Clegg, on behalf of the Stein estate. “While she established the PEN America award in her name to bring attention to and provide meaningful support to writers of the highest literary achievement, we know she would have respected the stance and sacrifice of the writers who have withdrawn from contention this year.”
Camille T. Dungy’s “Soil” had been the only remaining Stein award contender.
PEN announced Monday that judges had selected a handful of winners, among them Javier Fuentes’ “Countries of Origin” for debut novel, the PEN/Hemingway award. Playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner will still receive the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. Other honorary awards include the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, given to the late Maryse Condé.
Some authors have called for the resignation of Nossel and other top officials. Lacey, in an Instagram post last week, wrote that PEN needed to “make big changes in the leadership and move into a new era.” More than a dozen awards finalists endorsed a recent letter that demanded Nossel, Boylan and others step down and alleged that PEN had “shown blatant disregard of our collective values.”
A PEN spokesperson said it had no plans to respond to calls for Nossel and others to resign.
PEN’s other high-profile spring events — the “World Voices” festivals in New York and Los Angeles, and the gala at the American Museum of Natural History — will go ahead as scheduled. Klein and Moore are among the writers who have said they will not attend the World Voices festival, which Rushdie helped establish 20 years ago. Rushdie and other former PEN presidents, including Jennifer Egan and Andrew Solomon, had recently published a letter urging the literary community to participate in the festival.
“The festival was conceived amid conflict to draw together diverse authors and thinkers at a time of deepening and deadly geopolitical tension after 9/11,” the letter reads in part.
“We believe in PEN America and the festival and urge that, even at a time of discord, readers and writers will once again find a way to come together to jointly quest for insight and inspiration.”
Salman Rushdie has come to terms with the attempt on his life the only way he knows: by writing about it in his new book. He details the experience in his first television interview since the attack.
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Salman Rushdie has been a marked man for nearly half his life. In 1989 Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared his novel, “The Satanic Verses,” blasphemous, an insult to Islam, and called for the Indian-born writer’s assassination. Rushdie went into hiding with around the clock police protection for 10 years. He eventually moved to the U.S. and thought he was safe. But in August 2022, as he was about to speak at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York, Salman Rushdie was attacked by a Muslim man with a knife. Rushdie, who is now 76, lost his right eye, and came close to dying. He’s come to terms with the attempt on his life by writing a book about it… called, simply, “Knife”… which comes out Tuesday. This is his first television interview since the attack.
Anderson Cooper: You had had a dream two days, I think it was, before the attack. What was the dream?
Salman Rushdie: I kind of had a premonition. I mean, I had a dream of being attacked in an amphitheater. But it was a kind of Roman Empire dream, you know? As– as– as if I was in the Colosseum and it was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him. And I woke up and was quite shaken by it. And I had to go to Chautauqua, you know? And I said to my wife, Eliza, I said, “You know, I– I don’t want to go.”
Anderson Cooper: Because of the dream?
Salman Rushdie: Because of the dream. And then I thought, “Don’t be silly. It’s a dream.”
Salman Rushdie
60 Minutes
Salman Rushdie… one of his generation’s most acclaimed writers… had been invited to the town of Chautauqua, close to Lake Erie, to speak about a subject he knows all too well… the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat.
Anderson Cooper: Did you have any anxiety being in– in such a public space?
Salman Rushdie: Not really, because in the, what, more than 20 years that I’ve been living in America I’ve done a lot of these things.
Anderson Cooper: You haven’t had security around you or close protection–
Salman Rushdie: A long time–
Anderson Cooper: detail for a long time.
Salman Rushdie: Long time. But, you know, what happens in– many places that you go and lecture is that– that– that they’re used to having a certain degree of security, venue security. In this case, there wasn’t any.
Anderson Cooper: The irony, of course, is you were there to talk about writers in danger.
Salman Rushdie: Yeah, exactly. And the need for writers from other countries to have safe spaces in America, amongst other places. And then, yeah, it just turned out not to be a safe space for me.
For years no place was safe for Salman Rushdie, whose sprawling 600-page novel “The Satanic Verses” offended some Muslims for its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa—a religious decree—calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989.
There were worldwide protests from London to Lahore. “The Satanic Verses” was burned and 12 people died in clashes with police. The book’s Japanese translator was murdered, and others associated with it were attacked.
Anderson Cooper: Did you have any idea that it would cause violence?
Salman Rushdie: No. I had no idea. I thought probably some conservative religious people wouldn’t like it. But they didn’t like anything I wrote anyway. So, I thought, “Well, they don’t have to read it.”
Anderson Cooper: Were you naïve?
Salman Rushdie: Probably. You know, I mean, it’s easy looking back to think– but nothing like this had ever happened to anybody. And of course almost all the people who attacked the book did so without reading it. I was often told that I had intended to insult, offend people. And my view is — if I need to insult you, I can do it really quickly. I don’t need to spend five years of my life trying to write a 600-page book to insult you.
Salman Rushdie
60 Minutes
Rushdie was living in London when he went into hiding… and for the next 10 years the British government provided him with 24-hour police protection.
Anderson Cooper: Did people try to kill you?
Salman Rushdie: Yes. There were maybe as many as half a dozen serious assassination attempts– which were not random people. They were state-sponsored terrorism professionals.
After diplomatic negotiations, the Iranian state called off its assassins in 1998. Rushdie finally came out of the shadows. He moved to New York and for the next two decades lived openly… he was a man about town. He continued writing and became a celebrated advocate for freedom of expression. So, when he received the invitation to speak in Chautauqua in August 2022, he gladly accepted.
Salman Rushdie: I was seated at stage right.
In his new book “Knife,” he describes what happened next.
Salman Rushdie: Then, in the corner of my right eye– the last thing my right eye would ever see– I saw the man in black running towards me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low. A squat missile. I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way. So, my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, “So it’s you. Here you are.”
Anderson Cooper: “So it’s you. Here you are.”
Salman Rushdie: Yeah.
Anderson Cooper: It’s like you’d been th– waiting for it.
Salman Rushdie: Yeah, that’s what it felt like. It felt like something coming out of the distant past. And trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past in order to kill me. And when he got to me. He basically hit me very hard here. And initially I thought I’d been punched.
Anderson Cooper: You didn’t actually see a knife?
Salman Rushdie: I didn’t see the knife. And I didn’t realize until I saw blood coming out that there had been a knife in his– in his fist.
Anderson Cooper: So where was that stab?
Salman Rushdie: Here.
Anderson Cooper: In your neck?
Salman Rushdie: In my neck, yeah. then there were a lot more, the worst wounds was there was a big slash wound like this across my neck. And there was a s– puncture, a stab wound here. And then of course there was the attack on my eye.
Anderson Cooper: Do you remember being stabbed in the eye?
Salman Rushdie: No. I remember falling. Then I remember not knowing what had happened to my eye.
He was also stabbed in his hand, chest, abdomen, and thigh. Fifteen wounds in all.
Anderson Cooper: He was both stabbing–
Salman Rushdie: Stabbing and slashing–
Anderson Cooper: and also slashing.
Salman Rushdie: I think he was just wildly…
The attack lasted 27 seconds. To feel just how long that is…
Anderson Cooper: This is what 27 seconds is.
Anderson Cooper: That’s it.
Salman Rushdie: That’s quite a long time. That’s the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy, you know, in which life meets death.
Anderson Cooper: What stopped it from being longer?
Salman Rushdie: The audience pulling him off me.
Anderson Cooper: Strangers to you.
Salman Rushdie: Total s– I don’t– to this day, I don’t know their names.
Anderson Cooper and Salman Rushdie
60 Minutes
Some of those strangers restrained the attacker while others desperately tried to stem the flow of Rushdie’s blood.
Salman Rushdie: There was really a lot of blood.
Anderson Cooper: You were actually watching your blood–
Salman Rushdie: I was actually watching it spread. And then I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter-of-fact, it wasn’t like I was terrified of it or whatever. And yeah, there was nothing. No heavenly choirs. No pearly gates. I mean, I’m not– a supernatural person, you know? I believe that death comes as the end. There was nothing that happened that made me change my mind about that.
Anderson Cooper: You have not had a revelation.
Salman Rushdie: I have not had any revelation, except that there’s no revelation to be had.
His attacker… the man in black… was hustled off the stage.
Anderson Cooper: In the book, you do not use the attacker’s name.
Salman Rushdie: Yeah. I thought, you know, I don’t want his name in my book. And I don’t use it in conversation, either.
Anderson Cooper: That is important to you, not to give him space in your brain.
Salman Rushdie: Yeah. He and I had 27 seconds together, you know? That’s it. I don’t need to give him any more of my time.
Paramedics flew Rushdie to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, 40 miles away where a team of doctors battled for eight hours to save his life. When he finally came out of surgery, his wife Eliza, a poet and novelist, was waiting.
Eliza Griffiths: And he wasn’t moving. And he was just laid out.
Anderson Cooper: He looked half dead to you?
Eliza Griffiths: Yes. He did. He was a different color. He was cold. I mean, his– his face was stapled. Just staples holding his face together.
Rushdie was on a ventilator, unable to speak. Eliza and the doctors had no idea whether the knife that had penetrated his eye had damaged his brain.
Eliza Griffiths: Someone from the staff said that we would use this system of wiggling the toes.
Anderson Cooper: To communicate?
Eliza Griffiths: To communicate.
Salman Rushdie and Eliza Griffiths speak with Anderson Cooper
60 Minutes
Anderson Cooper: Do you remember the first question you asked to– to get a wiggle? Or…
Eliza Griffiths: I think I said, “Salman, it’s Eliza. Can you hear me?” And there was– there was a wiggle. And asked him, I think, “can you – do you know where you are?” And wiggled. And it was– it was a very basic, simple questions.
Salman Rushdie: ‘Cause you can’t express yourself with any subtlety with your toes. (laugh)
Eliza Griffiths: Which is your favorite thing. (laughter)
After 18 days in the hospital… and three weeks in rehab… Rushdie was discharged.
Salman Rushdie: One of the surgeons who had saved my life– said to me “first you were really unlucky, and then you were really lucky.” I said, “what’s the lucky part?” And he said, “well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”
Anderson Cooper: You’re not a believer in miracles. But the fact that you survived, you write in the book, is a miracle.
Salman Rushdie: This is a contradiction. (laugh) How does somebody who doesn’t believe in the supernatural account for the fact that something has happened which feels like a miracle? And I certainly don’t feel that some hand reached down from the skies and guarded me. But I do think something happened which wasn’t supposed to happen. And I have no explanation for it.
His attacker was a 24-year-old from New Jersey who lived in his mother’s basement. He is believed to be a lone wolf. He has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and is awaiting trial. In an interview he told the “New York Post” he’d only read a couple pages of ‘The Satanic Verses,’ and seen some clips of Rushdie on YouTube. He said he “didn’t like him very much” because Rushdie had “attacked Islam.”
Anderson Cooper: Does it matter to you what his motive was?
Salman Rushdie: I mean, it’s interesting to me because it’s a mystery. if I had written a character who knew so little about his proposed victim, and yet was willing to commit the crime of murder, my publishers might well say to me that that’s under-motivated.
Anderson Cooper: You need to develop that character better–
Salman Rushdie: Yeah, not enough of a reason, you know? Not convincing. But yet that’s what he did.
Salman Rushdie
60 Minutes
Rushdie’s“Knife”... his 22nd book… is one he initially did not want to write.
Salman Rushdie: That was the last thing I wanted to do.
Anderson Cooper: Because, you didn’t want this to yet again define you?
Salman Rushdie: Yeah. It was very difficult for me, after The Satanic Verses was published, that the only thing anybody knew about me was this death threat.
Salman Rushdie: But it became clear to me that I couldn’t write anything else.
Anderson Cooper: You had to write this first, before–
Salman Rushdie: I had to write this first. I just thought, you know – I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room, and the moment I thought that, kinda something changed in my head. And it then became a book I really very much wanted to write.
Anderson Cooper: You say the“language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. To take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine.”
Salman Rushdie: Yeah. I mean, language is– a way of breaking open the world. I don’t have any other weapons, but I’d been using this particular tool for quite a long time. So, I thought this was my way of dealing with it.
It’s been almost two years since the attack, and Rushdie is back home now in New York… slowly getting used to navigating the world with one eye.
Anderson Cooper: How much time did it take to kind of readjust.
Salman Rushdie: I’m still doing it.
Anderson Cooper: You still are?
Salman Rushdie: Yeah.
Anderson Cooper: Do you feel like you are a different person after the attack?
Salman Rushdie: I don’t feel I’m very different, but I do feel that it has left– a shadow. I think that shadow is just there. You know, and some days it’s dark and some days it’s not.
Anderson Cooper: You feel less than you were before?
Salman Rushdie: No, I just feel more the presence of death.
Anderson Cooper: In an interview almost 25 years ago you said of– of the fatwa, “I wanna find an end to this story. It is the one story I must find an end to.” Have you found that ending and an ending to this story as well–
Salman Rushdie: Well, I thought I had, and then it turned out I hadn’t. I’m hoping this is just a last twitch of that story. I don’t know. I’ll let you know.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story misstated the location of Chautauqua in New York. The story has been updated.
Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Warren Lustig.
Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006. His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television’s preeminent newsmen.
Author Salman Rushdie spent 18 days in the hospital and three weeks in rehab after he was attacked by a knife-wielding man in 2022. He shares what a surgeon told him about his survival.
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LONDON (AP) — Writer Salman Rushdie has made a public speech, nine months after being stabbed and seriously injured onstage, warning that freedom of expression in the West is under its most severe threat in his lifetime.
Rushdie delivered a video message to the British Book Awards, where he was awarded the Freedom to Publish award on Monday evening.
Organizers said the honor “acknowledges the determination of authors, publishers and booksellers who take a stand against intolerance, despite the ongoing threats they face.”
He said that “we live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.”
Salman Rushdie delivered a video message to the British Book Awards, where he was awarded the Freedom to Publish award on Monday evening.
“Now I am sitting here in the U.S., I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools,” he said. “The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard.”
Rushdie, 75, was blinded in one eye and suffered nerve damage to his hand when he was attacked at a literary festival in New York state in August.
His alleged assailant, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder.
Rushdie spent years in hiding with police protection after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, in 1989 calling for his death over the alleged blasphemy of the novel “The Satanic Verses.”
In his speech, Rushdie also criticized publishers who change decades-old books for modern sensibilities, such as large-scale cuts and rewrites to the works of children’s author Roald Dahl and James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
He said publishers should allow books “to come to us from their time and be of their time.”
“And if that’s difficult to take, don’t read it, read another book,” he said.
But, he said during his first interview since the attack, he still has a feeling of gratitude.
“Well, you know, I’ve been better,” he told The New Yorker’s David Remnick during an interview published Monday. “But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad.”
“The big injuries are healed, essentially,” Rushdie went on to describe. “I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.”
Remnick, who spoke with Rushdie both in person at his agent’s office in Manhattan and via Zoom, wrote that the Booker Prize-winning author had lost more than 40 pounds (18 kilograms) and mostly reads through an iPad so he can adjust the lighting and font size.
“There is scar tissue on the right side of his face,” Remnick wrote. “He speaks as fluently as ever, but his lower lip droops on one side. The ulnar nerve in his left hand was badly damaged.”
Rushdie, 75, lived in hiding for years after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death because of the alleged blasphemy of the novel “The Satanic Verses.” But he had long since moved about freely, with minimal security, and did not feel any sense of risk last August about appearing at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center in western New York.
Rushdie was on stage when approached by a young man dressed in black and carrying a knife. The alleged assailant, Hadi Matar, has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder. During his New Yorker interview, Rushdie referred to Matar as an “idiot,” but otherwise said he felt no anger.
“I’ve tried very hard over these years to avoid recrimination and bitterness,” he said. “I just think it’s not a good look. One of the ways I’ve dealt with this whole thing is to look forward and not backwards. What happens tomorrow is more important than what happened yesterday.”
The interview came out on the eve of the publication of Rushdie’s new novel, “Victory City,” which he completed a month before he was attacked. Featuring a protagonist who lives to be 247, “Victory” is a characteristically surreal and exuberant narrative about an imagined ancient poem that has received highly favorable reviews, with The Washington Post’s Ron Charles writing that “Rushdie’s magical style unfurls wonders.”
Rushdie had been silent for months on social media, but now tweets on occasion and even responds to insults. When a tweeter last week told him he was living a “disgraceful life,” Rushdie answered, “Oh, another fan! So pleased.”
During his interview, he noted ruefully that sales for his book had soared after the stabbing, as if he were more popular when in danger.
“Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me,” he said. “That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get 15 stab wounds, much better.”
On Monday, he tweeted a picture of himself, staring directly into the camera lens — his face thinner than in photos from before the stabbing, his right eye covered by a dark lens in his glasses frame.
He is otherwise still trying to recover. Rushdie has written that he initially had difficulty writing fiction after the fatwa, and he is having a hard time now, saying that he will sit down to work and “nothing happens,” just a “combination of blankness and junk.”
One project he may attempt: a follow-up to his 2012 memoir “Joseph Anton,” which he wrote in the third person.
“This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie said of a possible sequel. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”
Salman Rushdie said he feels overwhelmingly grateful and eager to keep writing, saying “you can’t regret your life,” in his first interview since surviving last summer’s brutal stabbing attack.
“I’m lucky. What I really want to say is that my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude,” he told The New Yorker while continuing to recover, both physically and mentally, after being stabbed more than a dozen times during a literary event in western New York.
“There have been nightmares — not exactly the incident, but just frightening. Those seem to be diminishing,” he said. “When I say I’m fine, I mean, there’s bits of my body that need constant checkups. It was a colossal attack.”
The attack left him hospitalized for six weeks. He lost 40 pounds and vision in his right eye. He also suffered nerve damage in his left hand, he said.
He also suggested having post-traumatic stress disorder from the ordeal and said he struggles with his writing.
“I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really,” he said.
The violence, which also injured another event presenter, followed decades of threats after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Rushdie’s death in 1989 over the publication of Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.” The book was considered blasphemous by some Muslims.
For a decade after this edict, called a fatwa, was declared, Rushdie said he lived underground in London for his own safety, fully believing that he was a dead man. He became less guarded after moving to New York in 2000, where he said he resolved to live his life freely, out in the open, leaving many of those around him nervous.
Rushdie said the only person he can blame for what happened last summer is the person responsible, though he admitted that he has questioned whether it was a mistake to let his guard down.
“Three-quarters of my life as a writer has happened since the fatwa. In a way, you can’t regret your life,” he said.
Hadi Matar, who faces attempted murder and assault charges for the attack, told The New York Post in a brief jailhouse interview last August that he had read only a couple of pages of “The Satanic Verses” but that he didn’t like Rushdie. He said he was surprised that Rushdie survived his injuries.
“He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems,” he said of the author.
Rushdie’s latest novel, “Victory City,” which he finished writing shortly before the attack, is slated for release Tuesday.
Civil wars over semicolons and heated debate over the word “looms” would not, on the face of it, seem like the stuff of a gripping big-screen movie.
But make no mistake about it, “Turn Every Page,” about the half-century relationship between author Robert Caro and his longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, is as much a rock ’em, sock ’em clash of heavyweights as found in any blockbuster — just one where the protagonists happen to quote from “King Lear” and Homer’s “Iliad.” The search for a sharpened pencil is about the most pressing issue at hand.
“He does the work. I do the cleanup. Then we fight,” neatly summarizes Gottlieb in the profoundly charming new documentary directed by his daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb.
Gottlieb, who has edited Toni Morrison, Charles Portis, Salman Rushdie and many others, is exaggerating, of course. “Turn Every Page” is not about foes, though it’s harder to say if it’s about friends.
Since Caro’s seminal Robert Moses history “The Power Broker,” they have been locked in a relationship of mutual dedication. Dedication to literature and history, but dedication, above all, to the details. Their journey together more or less started in 1973, when Caro dropped a million-word manuscript on Gottlieb, who knew, 15 pages in, that it was a masterpiece.
“Turn Every Page,” which opens in theaters Friday, is one of the finest films you’ll see about the craft of editing — not that there are so many of those. Gottlieb, warmly erudite, describes what he does as “a service job” of finding “what will be helpful, what will serve” the text and the writer. But it should be with a strong opinion, he says: “There has to be an equality.”
On Caro’s request, they aren’t interviewed together in “Turn Every Page,” and each even initially refused Lizzie’s interest in filming them. But as she toggles between each subject, her film leans on their similarities and parallel courses, sustaining the balance of writer-editor back-and-forth.
They are both Manhattan men of letters with considerable longevity (Caro is 87, Gottlieb 91). They are each authorities on the power centers of New York — Caro in his investigation of Moses, and Gottlieb as the former chief of Alfred A. Knopf, Simon & Schuster and The New Yorker.
And they are each driven by obsession. Caro can’t help researching every scrap of paper on Lyndon B. Johnson. (He remains at work on the fifth and final volume of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” ). Gottlieb, a voracious reader (“It had never occurred to me to be anything except a reader,” he says) who has a hobby collecting women’s handbags, for reasons that mystify his wife, Maria Tucci.
Caro’s fifth LBJ volume is to be their last book together. The question of whether they’ll both live to see it finished, you could say, looms over “Turn Every Page,” as do past battles over the overuse of some of Caro’s favored dramatic words. Disagreements about semicolons are spoken of like Union generals recalling Antietam.
It is, undeniably, delicious stuff to listen to these war stories, just as it is sometimes chastening to hear of their battle wounds. There may be no more haunting scene in movies this year than Caro describing the pain of cutting 350,000 words — enough for two or three more books — from “The Power Broker.” You believe him, absolutely, when he says it was the hardest thing he’s ever gone through in his life, just as you grasp the immense toil behind his sprawling histories when Caro says, “Writing, for me, anyway, is hard.” That Gottlieb deeply understands and respects this struggle is surely part of his bond with Caro or any writer.
For Caro, those words have all, naturally, been pecked out on a typewriter. In one moment, he shows the running tally inside the door to his coat closet tracking how many words he managed each day. Caro, private in his work to the point of paranoid prickliness, quickly realizes some of his notes might be too revealing and closes the door. When Caro later gets out a step stool to show the cupboard above the fridge where he nightly stores his carbon ribbons, it feels almost like Kane allowing a glimpse of Rosebud.
In the film’s sweet finale, Caro and Gottlieb finally let Lizzie film them working together — with a pencil — over a manuscript. But (again by Caro’s request) she’s not allowed to record any sound of their conversation. Their interaction passes like a dance — not as dazzling, perhaps, as one of Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds’ routines, but, in its humble way, just as stirring.
“Turn Every Page,” a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some language, brief war images and smoking. Running time: 112 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
Author Salman Rushdie has lost his sight in one eye and one of his hands is “incapacitated” following a stabbing attack in August, according to an interview given by his agent to a Spanish newspaper.
Rushdie, 75, underwent emergency surgery after he was stabbed several times before his scheduled lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York on August 12.
Staff members and guests then rushed onto the stage and held down the suspect, identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, before a state trooper assigned to the event took him into custody, according to New York State Police.
Matar has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder in the second degree, and second-degree assault, over the attack.
Speaking to El País, literary agent Andrew Wylie said, “[His wounds] were profound, but he’s [also] lost the sight of one eye … He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso. So, it was a brutal attack.”
Wylie declined to tell the newspaper if Rushdie was still hospitalized and did not specify when he had last been updated on Rushdie’s condition, according to an English language write-up of the interview. He said the most important thing was the writer was going to live.
Wylie also told El País he and Rushdie had talked about the possibility of such an attack in the past. “The principal danger that he faced so many years after the fatwa was imposed is from a random person coming out of nowhere and attacking [him],” he said. “So, you can’t protect against that because it’s totally unexpected and illogical. It was like John Lennon’s murder.”
El Pais said the interview was conducted from a hotel suite Wednesday evening, during the Frankfurt book fair.
CNN has contacted Wylie but did not receive an immediate response.
NEW YORK — Salman Rushdie’s agent says the author has lost sight in one eye and the use of a hand as he recovers from an attack from a man who rushed the stage at an August literary event in western New York, according to a published report.
Literary agent Andrew Wylie told the Spanish language newspaper El Pais in an article published Saturday that Rushdie suffered three serious wounds to his neck and 15 more wounds to his chest and torso in the attack that took away sight in an eye and left a hand incapacitated.
Rushdie, 75, spent years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 edict, a fatwa, calling for his death after publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Over the past two decades, Rushdie has traveled freely.
Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, has been incarcerated after pleading not guilty to attempted murder and assault in the Aug. 12 attack on Rushdie as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution, a rurally located center 55 miles (89 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo that is known for its summertime lecture series.
After the attack, Rushdie was treated at a Pennsylvania hospital, where he was briefly put on a ventilator to recover from what Wylie told El Pais was a “brutal attack” that cut nerves to one arm.
Wylie told the newspaper he could not say whether Rushdie remained in a hospital or discuss his whereabouts.
“He’s going to live … That’s the important thing,” Wylie said.
The attack was along the lines of what Rushie and his agent have thought was the “principal danger … a random person coming out of nowhere and attacking,” Wylie told El Pais.
“So you can’t protect against it because it’s totally unexpected and illogical,” he said.
Wylie told the newspaper it was like Beatles member John Lennon’s murder. Lennon was shot to death by Mark David Chapman outside his Manhattan apartment building Dec. 8, 1980, hours after the singer had signed an autograph for Chapman.
In a jailhouse interview with The New York Post, Matar said he disliked Rushdie and praised Khomeini. Iran has denied involvement in the attack.
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An earlier version of this report had an incorrect spelling of Salman Rushdie’s first name.
Salman Rushdie’s agent says the author has lost sight in one eye and the use of a hand as he recovers from an attack from a man who rushed the stage at an August literary event in western New York, according to a published report.
Literary agent Andrew Wylie told the Spanish language newspaper El Pais in an article published Saturday that Rushdie suffered three serious wounds to his neck and 15 more wounds to his chest and torso in the attack that took away sight in an eye and left a hand incapacitated.
Rushdie, 75, spent years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 edict, a fatwa, calling for his death after publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Over the past two decades, Rushdie has travelled freely.
Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, has been incarcerated after pleading not guilty to attempted murder and assault in the August 12 attack on Rushdie as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution, a rurally located center 89 kilometers southwest of Buffalo that is known for its summertime lecture series.
After the attack, Rushdie was treated at a Pennsylvania hospital, where he was briefly put on a ventilator to recover from what Wylie told El Pais was a brutal attack that cut nerves to one arm.
Wylie told the newspaper he could not say whether Rushdie remained in a hospital or discuss his whereabouts.
“He’s going to live … That’s the important thing, Wylie said.
The attack was along the lines of what Rushdie and his agent have thought was the principal danger … a random person coming out of nowhere and attacking,” Wylie told El Pais.
“So you can’t protect against it because it’s totally unexpected and illogical, he said.
Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie has lost sight in one eye and the ability to use one of his hands after he was stabbed onstage in August, his literary agent said this weekend, in the first update on the author’s condition in months.
Salman Rushdie at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 10, 2015 in Cheltenham, England.
Getty Images
Key Facts
Andrew Wylie, who represents Rushdie and some of the world’s other most well-known writers, told Spanish newspaper El Pais Rusdhie is unable to use one hand because nerves in his arm were cut.
Rushdie sustained three serious neck wounds and 15 additional wounds in his chest and torso during the attack, which Wylie described as “brutal.”
Wylie would not comment on whether Rushdie was still in the hospital but said the author will survive his injuries, which he said is “the more important thing.”
Key Background
In August, Rushdie was attacked just after taking the stage in Chautauqua, N.Y., for a lecture on writers living in exile. Just after Rushdie was introduced, police say Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey, jumped onstage and attacked Rushdie with a knife. Matar pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault in August. In a jailhouse interview with the New York Post, Matar praised Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the former Iranian leader who called for Rushdie’s death more than three decades ago over The Satanic Verses, which was partially inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and sparked backlash from religious leaders who said the novel was blasphemous. Khomeini issued a fatwa (a legal ruling on a point of Islamic law) urging Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers “without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth,” and offered a bounty of $2.8 million. Rushdie is the fifth person connected to the publishing of the The Satanic Verses to have been the victim of violent crime.
Tangent
Sales of The Satanic Verses—which was first published in the U.S. in 1989—soared after Rushdie was attacked, becoming the 18th-most-popular book in the U.S. on Amazon.
STOCKHOLM — French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society.
Ernaux ‘s books probe deeply personal experiences and feelings – love, sex, abortion, shame – within a society split by gender and class divisions. The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her background in a working-class family in the Normandy region of northwest France.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux is “an extremely honest writer who is not afraid to confront the hard truths.”
“She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. I mean, really hard experiences,” he told The Associated Press after the award announcement in Stockholm. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. They are short books, but they are really moving.”
One of France’s most-garlanded authors and a prominent feminist voice, Ernaux said she was happy to have won the prize, which carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) — but “not bowled over.”
“I am very happy, I am proud. Voila, that’s all,” Ernaux said in brief remarks to journalists outside her home in Cergy, a town west of Paris that she has written about.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “Annie Ernaux has been writing for 50 years the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.”
While Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been unsparing with him. A supporter of left-wing causes for social justice, she has poured scorn on Macron’s background in banking and said his first term as president failed to advance the cause of French women.
Ernaux is the first female French Nobel literature winner and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. More than a dozen French writers have received the literature prize since Sully Prudhomme won the inaugural award in 1901. The most recent French winner before Ernaux was Patrick Modiano in 2014.
Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents.
Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “written in plain language, scraped clean.” He said she had used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a writer of fiction.
Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was “Cleaned Out” in 1974. Two more autobiographical novels followed – “What They Say Goes” and “The Frozen Woman” – before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books.
In the book that made her name, “A Man’s Place,” published in 1983 and about her relationship with her father, she writes: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.”
“Shame,” published in 1997, explored a childhood trauma, while “Happening,” from 2000 depicts an illegal abortion.
Her most critically acclaimed book is “The Years,” published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Unlike in previous books, in “The Years,” Ernaux wrote in the third person, calling her character “she” rather than “I.” The book received numerous awards and honors, and Olsson said it has been called “the first collective autobiography.”
“A Girl’s Story,” from 2016, follows a young woman’s coming of age in the 1950s.
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated. Last year’s prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa.
Olsson said the academy was working to diversify its range, drawing on experts in literature from different regions and languages.
“We try to broaden the concept of literature but it is the quality that counts, ultimately,” he said.
The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. poet Louise Glück in 2020 helped the literature prize move on from years of controversy and scandal.
In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.
A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.
Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Monday.
The prizes will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
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Macpherson reported from Clergy, France and Lawless from London. John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Naomi Koppel in London, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
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Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
