An announcement regarding the Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for the assassination of Salman Rushdie because of what The Satanic Verses implied about Islam, 8.5 x 11, reads, in part: “Norman Mailer, Author at a Meeting of Authors, New York City, February 22, 1989…The Ayatollah Khomeini has offered us (writers) an opportunity to regain our frail religion, which happens to be faith in the power of words and our willingness to suffer for them…We discover that, yes, maybe we are willing to suffer for our ideas. Maybe we are even willing, ultimately, to die for the idea that serious literature, in a world of dwindling certainties and choked-up ecologies, is the absolute we must defend.” Signed in black ink at the conclusion. R&R COA.
