Playwright and author Ayad Akhtar joined actor Aasif Mandvi to perform selections from his newest novel Homeland Elegies: A Novel, an “intense elegy for an America that often goes awry while still offering hope” (Library Journal). In telling the story of an American son and his immigrant father living in Post-Trump America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author has crafted a deeply personal work about belonging and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams.
Author Jennifer Egan interviewed Akhtar following the performance.
Featured Book
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Homeland Elegies: A Novel
By Ayad Akhtar
Published by Little, Brown and Company
A “profound and provocative” new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish: an immigrant father and his son search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews).
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.
