MAYVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — Salman Rushdie is “on the road to restoration,” his agent confirmed Sunday, two times soon after the creator of “The Satanic Verses” experienced critical accidents in a stabbing at a lecture in upstate New York.

The announcement followed news that the lauded writer was taken off from a ventilator Saturday and able to discuss and joke. Literary agent Andrew Wylie cautioned that although Rushdie’s “condition is headed in the ideal route,” his recovery would be a extensive system. Rushdie, 75, suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, Wylie had beforehand claimed, and was probably to get rid of the hurt eye.

“Though his everyday living altering injuries are critical, his typical feisty & defiant perception of humour remains intact,” Rushdie’s son Zafar Rushdie claimed in a Sunday statement that pressured the creator remained in significant situation. The assertion on behalf of the household also expressed gratitude for the “audience members who bravely leapt to his defence,” as well as police, doctors and “the outpouring of love and assistance from close to the globe.”

Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, pleaded not guilty Saturday to attempted murder and assault prices in what a prosecutor named “a focused, unprovoked, preplanned attack” at the Chautauqua Establishment, a nonprofit instruction and retreat heart.

The attack was achieved with world-wide shock and outrage, alongside with praise for the person who, for additional than three many years, has weathered death threats and a $3 million bounty on his head for “The Satanic Verses.” Rushdie even spent nine decades in hiding less than a British federal government protection plan.

Authors, activists and govt officials cited Rushdie’s bravery and longtime championing of free of charge speech in the face of these types of intimidation. Writer and longtime buddy Ian McEwan labeled Rushdie “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists” and actor-author Kal Penn known as him a function design “for an complete generation of artists, particularly quite a few of us in the South Asian…