Fisher Center, Written Arts Program
Homeland Elegies
A Conversation with Ayad Akhtar
October 23, 2020
Fisher Center, Written Arts Program
October 23, 2020
"Homeland Elegies is a very American novel. It’s a lover’s quarrel with this country, and . . . it has candor and seriousness to burn.” —New York Times
“Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.” —Salman Rushdie
In this time of continued separation, we look to stories that can unite, ignite, and illuminate. The Fisher Center and the Bard College Written Arts Program are inviting our community, on- and off-campus, to join a “read-in” and subsequent conversation centered on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ayad Akhtar’s new novel.
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. 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.
Bard’s Director of Written Arts and MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu moderates a conversation with Akhtar, followed by a Q&A with the virtual audience.
Purchase your copy of Homeland Elegies from Oblong Books & Music via this link, and 10% of your purchase will come back to the Fisher Center to support our virtual programming.