Ayad Akhtar on Capitalism, Literature & the U.S. Decline

15 November, 2020

Jordan Elgrably

The Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright of Disgraced and other plays including Junk: the Golden Age of Debt, and The Who and the What, Ayad Akhtar is the author of the new novel Homeland Elegies, a masterful tour of the United States pre- and post-9/11, in which he asserts that Trump “is the ultimate symptom for what has happened to all of us.” A critic of capitalism, Akhtar talks about the need to understand the value of debt. He also reveals how he lives his Muslim identity as a writer heavily influenced by Shakespeare and Philip Roth. In this extended conversation he speaks with TMR editor Jordan Elgrably, who recently reviewed Homeland Elegies in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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