For a guy with a bounty on his head, Salman Rushdie has always loved to party.
So was absolutely thrilled this week to see the author back to doing what he does best (well, second best, perhaps, after the writing): regaling smoking-hot women and generally rolling out his whole “international debonair genius” thing on the New York nightlife circuit.
Just a year after handily seeing off a would-be assassin, Rushdie was at the Library Lions gala on Monday at the famed 42nd Street home of the New York Public Library, where he told us he’s feeling well after the attack.
“I’m OK, thank you,” Rushie, who was there with his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, told us. “I’m good.”
The “Midnight’s Children” writer told he’d come out to fête his pal, dancer and author Bill T. Jones, who was one of the five people being awarded the library’s highest honor, the Library Lions medal.
“He’s a great friend. We came out to support him and all these other great people,” he said.
Rushdie looked flier than an air ambulance, wearing his own Lions medal and a pair of glasses with a single blacked-out lens over his awesome knife scar, lending kind of a Bond-villain-meets-Roy-Orbison-in-Monte-Carlo air to his otherwise understatedly stylish look.
“I’m a Lion,” he added, “I’m an old Lion. I looked on the back of this medal and it said 2008 — 15 years ago. It feels like yesterday.”
But he wouldn’t spill about his upcoming memoir, “Knife.” “It comes out in April,” he said, “I’ll tell you more in April!”
On August 12 last year Rushdie was stabbed several times just before he was set to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York. He was badly injured, with serious damage to his liver and his right eye. A fatwah was put on Rushdie after the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1988.
Also receiving the award were…
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