Readers are flocking to buy Salman Rushdie’s books after the author was stabbed last week on stage before a lecture in Chautauqua, New York, NBC News reports.
Sales of the author’s novels have spiked since the attack. On Amazon, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses—the book that led to the infamous 1989 fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—was ranked No. 8 on the retailer’s most-sold fiction chart. As of Thursday morning, it was the 98th bestselling book on Amazon.
It was also ranked No. 61 at Barnes & Noble’s website, which listed it as temporarily out of stock. And it was listed as a bestseller, and also backordered, at Bookshop.org.
Vulture reports that Steph Opitz, Bookshop.org’s director of strategic partnerships, said that “searches for The Satanic Verses and Salman Rushdie jumped over 10,000 percent last week, with The Satanic Verses hitting our top 10 most-searched-for books and No. 8 on our best-seller list.”
It’s not known whether Rushdie’s attack was motivated by Khomeini’s fatwa. Hadi Matar, the man who has been charged with attempted murder in connection with the assault, told the New York Post in an interview, “I respect the ayatollah. I think he’s a great person. That’s as far as I will say about that.”
Matar also told the newspaper that he hadn’t read The Satanic Verses. Neither, the New Yorker recently reported, did Ayatollah Khomeini.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
