Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

In my essay collection Languages of Truth I wrote about the inspiration for and birth of the PEN America World Voices Festival. To avoid repeating myself, I’ll just say that if Norman Mailer hadn’t been president of PEN back in 1986—if he hadn’t raised a ton of money and invited a glittering array of the world’s greatest writers to New York City for that legendary Congress at which Günter Grass and Saul Bellow got angry with each other about poverty in the South Bronx, and John Updike used the little blue mailboxes of America as a metaphor of freedom and his coziness irritated a substantial segment of the audience, and Cynthia Ozick accused the Austrian ex-chancellor Bruno Kreisky (a Jew himself) of anti-Semitism because he had met with Yasser Arafat, and Grace Paley got angry with Norman for putting too few women on the panels, and Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag disagreed with Grace because “literature is not an equal opportunity employer”—and if I hadn’t been the starstruck new kid on the block, if those wild days at the Essex House hotel on Central Park South hadn’t happened, I might never have had the notion of launching an international literary festival eighteen years later, in a city that had international festivals of everything, but not, until then, of literature. And if I hadn’t set about creating that festival with the help of PEN’s Mike Roberts and Esther Allen and many other PEN people, and if it hadn’t become the successful annual literary equivalent of bas...