Salman Rushdie recently appeared at the McNally Johnson bookstore near the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. “It’s not really close to where I live, but I come here often,” he said.
He was looking for his books. His latest work, The Eleventh Hour, is his 23rd collection of short stories and short stories.
Life changed after the 2022 attack that nearly killed him. “I think what has changed is that there has to be security in matters affecting the public that hasn't been there for 20 years,” he said.
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On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was on stage in Chautauqua, New York, ready to make a wry comment about America as a safe haven for writers. The man rushed at him with a knife.
His account of the attack “The Knife” was published in 2024: “I raise my left hand in self-defense. He stabs her with a knife… This is followed by many blows – to the neck, to the chest, to the eye, everywhere. I feel my legs give way and I fall.”
Rushdie lost sight in his right eye. “I can still read,” he said, “but I find myself using the iPad in ways I never have before. Because there is light and because I can adjust the font size. So, I never, ever read books on the iPad, but now I do.”
His left arm and liver were severely damaged, but he survived, which he considers a “miracle.”
In May of this year, Rushdie's attacker, the Lebanese-American Hadi Matar, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Prosecutors argued he was acting in accordance with a fatwa, a 1989 order by Iran's leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, to kill the author, arguing that passages from his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” were insulting to Islam.
Previously known only for his fiction, Rushdie suddenly became internationally famous (infamous to some) thanks to his fatwa. After nearly ten years in hiding under 24-hour British security protection, Rushdie was released and moved to New York. Times of thinking have changed. But he was wrong.
However, the author does not appear bitter or angry. “I think that’s who I am,” he said.
I suggested, “Most people would say, well, that's a clear recipe for living with PTSD.”
“Well, I have a therapist,” Rushdie said, “and at one point I asked him to list the symptoms of PTSD for me. And I said, “But I don’t seem to have these symptoms, so what’s wrong with me?” And he said, “Well, it's because you're cool, that's the technical term.”
The new book is the first fiction he has published since the attack.
So why The Eleventh Hour? “Well, for starters, I’m 78 years old,” he said. “Secondly, I had a pretty close brush with death, you know, and I got away with it. But it makes you think, you know? So, I thought the idea of time running out was something that was in my head.”
“Times are tough in America”
“Now you have entered the magical space of my childhood,” says the fictional narrator of one story as he takes a final walk up the hill to the neighborhood where the real Salman Rushdie grew up in Mumbai, India (which he still calls Bombay). “My relationship with this place has now become elegiac,” Rushdie said. This relationship is about something that has passed.
He left India for an English boarding school at the age of 13. He left Britain after spending almost 40 years there. He became an American citizen in 2016. Rushdie sees his place in the world through the eyes of an immigrant.
Asked how he felt after becoming a US citizen, Rushdie said: “I remember getting into a taxi, leaving the office where I was sworn in, and being driven back through the city streets, and it was a different feeling. I thought: Oh I can belong. And it was very good.”
I asked, “Has the feeling you had when you were sworn in as a citizen broken or changed by what has happened since then, both in public life in the United States and with you?”
“Times are tough in America, but times are tough all over the world,” he responded. “If you think of countries as people, there is their best self and their less good self.” And it would be good if this country remembered its better self.
Random House 
The Eleventh Hour includes a ghost story, characters who get revenge, and a missing writer. But the book is also political. He writes: “Words like ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ lose their meaning, lose their meaning and can no longer shape society.”
The meaning of words matters to Rushdie, who devoted his entire career to defending freedom of speech, even though its implementation nearly killed him.
He said: “The last story in the collection, The Old Man in the Square, is a kind of allegory of this. In fact, freedom of speech, to my great surprise, language itself has become a character, a female character. She just walked into history and sat in the corner, and I didn’t expect her at all.”
“In fact, this is a very ancient language, one of the oldest and richest…” he writes in the story about what happens when speech is limited. “It’s even possible, although it’s hard for her to admit it even to herself, that she could die. Nobody is listening. Nobody cares.”
The tongue leaves its corner and people can no longer speak: “We don’t know how events will develop. Our words fail us.”
“It's quite amazing and scary,” I said.
“Yes,” Rushdie agreed. “That's how it should be.”
READ REST: “The Eleventh Hour” by Salman Rushdie
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The story was produced by Amol Mhatre. Editor Jason Schmidt.
