Salman Rushdie in conversation with Karen Grigsby Bates at Live Talks Los Angeles ()

Video from a Live Talks Los Angeles event with Salman Rushdie discussing his memoir, “Joseph Anton,“ with NPR’s Karen Grigsby Bates. Event was taped at the William Turner Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica on September 23, 2012. On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.” So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph Anton. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murd