Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" is a paradigmatic text for considering the public life of books -- the geopolitical and cultural consequences of a novel's publication and reception in a series of both distinct and connected sites. This seminar will read Rushdie''s novel in three contexts: first, in and of itself; second, in the context of Rushdie's autobiographical writing and related reflections and interrogations of the book and its standing and impact; third, in the ongoing context of the "Rushdie Affair" associated with the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 Fatwa, through to the 2022 attack on the author. These readings will be informed by our consideration of contemporaneous reviews, before and after the Fatwa; of Rushdie scholarship and current public writing about Rushdie; and of classic and more recent studies of the novel and politics ranging from the likes of Debjani Ganguly, Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Irving Howe, among others.