As we were editing our Sept. 15 isssue in mid-August, news broke that author Salman Rushdie had been attacked at a lecture in western New York state. The story sent shock waves through the literary community—a stark reminder that violence can lurk in the corners of literary debate. Rushdie is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction and is most celebrated for his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, a kaleidoscopic epic of Indian life after independence that won the Booker Prize as well as two subsequent honors, the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008.

But looming over the August assault was another Rushdie novel: 1988’s The Satanic Verses. Like Rushdie’s earlier novels, it was a magical realist tale, dealing, among many other subjects, with the nature of good and evil and the foundation of Islam as filtered through the fun-house mirror of the author’s imagination. Kirkus’ contemporary review called it “an entertainment in the highest sense of that much-exploited word.” The book made international news after inspiring protests and, fatefully, a fatwa—an edict issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declaring the novel to be a blasphemy against Islam and calling for the author’s death.

At the time of the book’s U.S. release, I was just out of college and working at Asian Books, a specialty bookshop (now long closed) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For someone interested in Asian culture and history, as I was, it was a thrilling place to work—we carried a vast range of books, many of them hard to find elsewhere, about East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Faculty at local universities sent their students to the store to purchase books for their classes, and the books in the sections on Islam and Middle Eastern religions were among the most sought after. The shop’s owners did not see it as a contradiction that we also stocked—and prominently displayed—The Satanic Verses, though I’m certain there were closed-door discussions to which I was not privy. Threats—and actual attacks—against bookstores did, in fact, occur.

The fatwa upended Rushdie’s life. In the wake of last month’s attack, I turned to the author’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, a fascinating account of the controversy and his years of living in hiding, under state protection and with the assumed name of the book’s title, a nod to two favorite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. (The book also offers great insight into Rushdie’s background, how he came to write The Satanic Verses, and what the book meant to him.) Eventually, Rushdie moved to New York and began to live more openly; in 2004, he became president of PEN America, a nonprofit organization defending freedom of expression. Reading the memoir—already written at a remove from the events of the late ’80s, when The Satanic Verses made global headlines—was an uncanny reminder that the dark human urges to suppress literature and perpetrate violence are always with us, even when out of sight.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.