Omar El Akkad Discusses One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This with Hala Alyan
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values, in conversation with Hala Alyan
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks into the bombing of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet that was viewed more than 10 million times. As an immigrant who came to Canada and the United States, Omar El Akkad believed that these countries promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, El Akkad has come to question much of what the West promises.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want to question the way things are and who want something better.
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Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. Her new memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home, is forthcoming this year from Avid Reader Press. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
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