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Book Cover for: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Salman Rushdie

Reader Score

87%

87% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 13 reviews on

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The New York Times Best Seller
2024 The New York Times Best Seller
Finalist:National Book Award -Nonfiction (2024)
Longlist:Baillie Gifford Prize -Nonfiction (2024)
From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him

Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art--and finding the strength to stand up again.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Random House
  • Publish Date: Apr 16th, 2024
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 1.00in - 0.80lb
  • EAN: 9780593730249
  • Categories: MemoirsCultural & RegionalLiterary Figures

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of fifteen novels--Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor's Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize); and Victory City--and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published five works of nonfiction--The Jaguar Smile; Imaginary Homelands; Step Across This Line; Joseph Anton; and Languages of Truth--and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Candid, plain-spoken and gripping . . . Knife is a clarifying book. It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for."--The New York Times

"Knife isn't so much about pondering imminent death than it is an affirmation--an insistence--on returning to life."--San Francisco Chronicle

"The subject--the idea for which Rushdie nearly died--is the freedom to say what he wants . . . Rushdie survived, but he has too many scars to be certain that the idea will. This book is his way of fighting back."--The Atlantic

"A brave and beautiful book that tells his story with a cathartic relish, no gruesome detail spared . . . this book is as much a love letter to his wife--the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths--as it is a punch-back at his assailant."--The Wall Street Journal

Salman Rushdie's memoir is horrific, upsetting--and a masterpiece . . . Knife is a tour-de-force, in which the great novelist takes his brutal near-murder and spins it into a majestic essay on art, pain and love . . . full of Rushdie's wit, his wisdom, his stoicism, his optimism, his love of all culture."--Daily Telegraph

"Knife is in part about--and in some sense itself is--a battle between the two most prominent Rushdies: Great Writer and Great Man, artist and advocate, private person and public figure . . . Contains some of the most precise, chilling prose of his career."--Vulture

"Not just a candid and fearless book but--against all odds--a defiantly witty one . . . A 'reckoning', if not quite a catharsis, Rushdie's invigorating dispatch from (almost) the far side of death's door names and limits the attack as 'a large red ink blot.'"--The Financial Times

"Rushdie's triumph is not to be other: despite his terrible injuries and the threat he still lives under, he remains incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about art and free speech."--The Guardian

"Knife is testament to Rushdie's convictions and to the sustaining power of love as he focuses on the suffering and support of his family and his wife, writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, during this ordeal . . . every electrifying page elicits tears and awe."--Booklist

"A graceful meditation on life and death that captures Rushdie at his most observant and lyrical."--Kirkus