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Salman Rushdie is the bestselling author of 23 books, including Midnight’s Children, for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker Prize; Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories; two memoirs, Joseph Anton and Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, including Languages of Truth. More about this author >
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From the publisher:
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.
What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.
Knife is a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.
This slender, trenchant book is a gift, a synecdoche for the end times. Commencing with the attempt on his life, Salman Rushdie ultimately takes revenge on revenge itself, discovering a kind of mercy in the writing of Knife. In an age where the word “weaponize” hangs on every lip, Rushdie’s prose emerges in the end as comedy in the largest, late-Shakespearean sense: an uneasy habitat for all the emotions on Earth. This is a work of undeniable heart, humility, and grace.
