“A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”
Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced, comes Homeland Elegies blending fact and fiction to tell the story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made—of an immigrant father, an American son, and the country they both call home.
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies is part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel.
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.
Ayad Akhtar is a playwright, novelist, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Literature. He is the author of American Dervish, published in more than twenty languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012. As a playwright, he has written Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand. He is the board president of PEN/America.
More about Ayad Akhtar
Ayad Akhtar’s Website
The New Yorker, September 14, 2020
An American Writer for an Age of Division
Tin House’s Between the Covers Podcast, October 2020
Ayad Akhtar : Homeland Elegies
NPR’s Morning Edition, September 14, 2020
It’s Real, It’s Fiction, It’s A Paradox: Ayad Akhtar On His ‘Homeland Elegies’
“With Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar has found the perfect hybrid form for his exuberant, insightful, and wickedly entertaining epic about Muslim immigrants and their American-born children. A deeply moving father-and-son story unfolds against tumultuous current events in a book that anyone wanting to know how we as a nation got where we are today — and into what dark wood we might be heading tomorrow — should read.”
Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
Books
Homeland Elegies is available from White Whale Bookstore.