Paul Auster and Gay Talese, among other well-known authors, gathered on Friday in Manhattan for a reading of Salman Rushdie’s works in support of the author, who was stabbed numerous times and is in serious condition.
The event featured speeches from more than a dozen well-known authors, including Rushdie’s friends and colleagues.
One week ago, while Rushdie, 75, was getting ready to be questioned as part of a lecture series in upstate New York, he was stabbed multiple times in the neck and abdomen.
While Irish author Colum McCann read from the 1992 New Yorker essay ‘Out of Kansas,’ American literary journalist John Talese, wearing his trademark fedora and three-piece suit, read an excerpt from Rushdie’s book ‘The Golden House.’
A.M. Homes, an American author whose own works, like the novel ‘The End of Alice,’ have generated controversy over the years, read aloud Rushdie’s essay ‘On Censorship,’ which was adapted from a lecture he gave in 2012.
No writer truly wants to talk about censorship, she read. According to authors who want to talk about creation, censorship is ‘anti-creation, negative energy, uncreation, the bringing into being of non-being.’
Rushdie lived under police protection for years after Iranian leaders pleaded for his death for the way he had represented Islam and the Prophet Mohammed in his 1988 novel ‘The Satanic Verses.’
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