Open Book: Omar El Akkad

Summary

Live Wire with Luke Burbank: Open Book featuring Omar El Akkad

Release Date: July 9, 2025
Host: Elena Passarello
Guest: Omar El Akkad

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Introduction

In this episode of Live Wire with Luke Burbank, host Elena Passarello engages in a thoughtful and engaging conversation with acclaimed writer Omar El Akkad. Known for his impactful novels such as American War, which the BBC recognized as one of the 100 novels that have shaped our world, Omar delves into his writing process, reading habits, and the challenges of engaging with book clubs. The discussion offers listeners a deep dive into the mind of a writer navigating both fiction and nonfiction landscapes.

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Omar El Akkad’s Journey as a Writer

Omar El Akkad transitions seamlessly from journalism to novel writing, bringing a unique perspective to his literary work. Elena introduces Omar by highlighting his impressive portfolio, including his debut novel American War and his latest work, One Day. Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Notable Quote:

“Books are, without exaggeration, my whole life.”
— Omar El Akkad [02:44]

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Challenges of Engaging with Book Clubs

Omar shares his initial anxieties about participating in book club events. His first encounter was particularly nerve-wracking when he mistakenly interacted with the wrong author, leading to an awkward yet enlightening experience.

Key Points:

• The emotional toll and intimidation writers often feel when addressing book clubs.
• The unexpected mix-up during his first book event, illustrating the unpredictability of public engagements.

Notable Quote:

“I have no faith in my own ability to like hold my own in that conversation, regardless.”
— Omar El Akkad [21:30]

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Reading Habits and Literary Influences

Omar discusses his voracious and, at times, arbitrary reading habits cultivated during his youth. Growing up in a culture with heavy censorship, he recounts how books like Little Women and Dennis Rodman’s autobiography opened new worlds for him, despite limited access.

Key Points:

• The impact of censorship on his early reading experiences.
• The lasting impression of books that resonated more on a stylistic level than on plot.

Notable Quote:

“I was in this space after I read it or while I was reading it.”
— Omar El Akkad [11:13]

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The Art of Titling Books

The conversation shifts to the craft of titling literary works. Omar reflects on his own experiences with international titles and shares his admiration for other authors' creative choices.

Key Points:

• The translation and adaptation of book titles in different cultures.
• Examples of compelling titles like No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khalid Khalifa and I Become a Delight to My Enemies by Sarah Peters.

Notable Quote:

“I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking of titles, and it doesn't mean I'm good at them or anything like that.”
— Omar El Akkad [16:42]

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Controversial Literary Opinions

Omar offers a candid critique of pretentiousness in literary circles, specifically targeting the superficial methods some use to appear erudite at literary events.

Key Points:

• The prevalence of using dense and impenetrable novels as a facade of intelligence.
• Personal experiences of engaging with such tactics and the resulting disillusionment.

Notable Quote:

“It's all just a bunch of tricks in people's back pockets. And it does a disservice to people who actually know what the hell they're talking about.”
— Omar El Akkad [20:47]

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Balancing Reading for Pleasure and Professional Growth

Omar discusses the delicate balance between reading for personal enjoyment and reading to enhance his writing craft. He highlights his preference for poetry and interviews with other writers as a means of inspiration without the competitive pressure of fiction genres.

Key Points:

• The necessity of separating reading for pleasure from reading for professional improvement.
• The therapeutic role of poetry and literary interviews in maintaining his passion for writing.

Notable Quote:

“There's no jealousy. Right. There's not even, like, the prerequisites for jealousy.”
— Omar El Akkad [13:36]

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Omar reiterating his appreciation for authentic literary conversations and his commitment to fostering meaningful discussions about literature. His insights offer aspiring writers and avid readers alike a glimpse into the intricate world of book creation and the personal challenges that accompany it.

Notable Quote:

“There is no right or wrong way. There is no acceptable or unacceptable, but you have to deal with it.”
— Omar El Akkad [15:13]

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Final Thoughts:
Omar El Akkad's dialogue with Elena Passarello provides a rich exploration of the complexities of being an author in today's literary landscape. From grappling with public perceptions and literary elitism to finding personal joy in diverse reading genres, Omar's reflections are both insightful and inspiring. Listeners are encouraged to explore his works to fully appreciate the depth of his literary contributions.

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For more engaging conversations with writers and cultural observers, tune into Live Wire with Luke Burbank on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcript

[Molly McAleer]

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[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

And I'm Tiffany Scott Maddox.

[Molly McAleer]

We like to break down trending topics for those in the know and those who wanna know but don't wanna know but wanna know. I know. Well, what have we talked about lately? Mu Dang Luigi Azealia Banks Beef with Matty Healy yes, exploring public beef so that you can be on the right side of history is a staple. Same with deep diving, long reads and holding space for new lingo. Niche drama, TV and movie RECs with a sprinkle of geopolitics. But like in a girly way, Trend Lightly is available anywhere you listen to podcasts.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Livewire is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

[Molly McAleer]

This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way you can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo@o-o o.com that's o d o o.com hi there, I'm writer Elena Passarello and this is Open Book, a literary podcast from Livewire Radio, brought to you by Powell's Books, where we talk to writers about their reading habits. When I'm not having fun being Livewire's announcer, writing is my job. I'm the author of two nonfiction books and I'm currently digging my way through a third project. Please send me all of your good vibes and also all of your donuts outside my own projects. I teach writing here in Oregon and I work as an editor for a couple of small presses. All of this is to say that books are, without exaggeration, my whole life. This week I'm talking to writer Omar El Akkad. Omar is a journalist turned author whose books have now been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of the 100 novels that has shaped our World. And his latest book is Shaping the World right now. It's called One Day. Everyone Will have always been against this. I've gotten to know Omar a little over the years, and he is a great writerly pal. He's the kind of pal who makes you think really deeply one minute and then makes you laugh hysterically the next. And for our conversation for Open Book, we talk about the unnerving process of visiting book clubs as an authority. We talk about the difference between reading for plot and reading for great sentences. And we dish about great book titles as well. So here he is, Omar El Akkad on Open Book. Omar, welcome to Openbook.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Thank you so much for having me. It's so anxiety inducing to do this with somebody who has a good radio voice. I cannot tell you how, like, nervous I am right now.

[Molly McAleer]

What. What do you think about your. I think your voice sounds great.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

So I went and did the audiobook for this new book because they couldn't have anybody else do that, probably for their own safety. Previous to that, I'd done this podcast that absolutely nobody listened to. But the notes on the podcast on every episode was just like, hey, can you, like, perk this up a little bit? Like, can you give us a little bit more? And I'm like, no, I'm sorry, I'm just a naturally depressing person. But then I went to do this book and the audio engineers, as soon as they heard me was like, that's perfect, perfect. That's exactly the energy we need for this. So it worked out fine.

[Molly McAleer]

But I know you also sometimes do some kind of comedy stuff for fun. And do you have a kind of like a Steven Wright approach because your voice has this more low key quality?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

I don't really do comedy. What happens is my books are so depressing that if I make any kind of joke at all or any amount of levity in any kind of social circumstance, it's considered high comedy.

[Molly McAleer]

Right?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Because, you know, the very first book event I ever did in my life was this book club where I went in and I was very nervous. And I did the stupid thing I do when I'm nervous, which is try to make jokes. And it was just crickets, tumbleweeds. And afterwards I was like, hey, were the jokes really that bad? And the organizer of the book club was like, no, no. We just thought you'd be just as depressing as your book is. And so we were caught off guard. And so I think that's what's happening. But certainly there's been many times where My deadpan has been too deadpan.

[Molly McAleer]

Right.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

And once you cross the uncanny valley, it's just bad. It's just. It's weird in every conceivable way.

[Molly McAleer]

You mentioned your first event as an author, you were a journalist for decades plus. Before that, it was a book club. I don't think a lot of readers and people in book clubs realize how anguishing it can be for a writer to go in front of a book club. I don't know. Did you have that experience? Mine have been pretty anguishing.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

I mean, that one specifically. Book clubs generally are pretty intense.

[Molly McAleer]

Yeah.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Because people, you know, you've stolen their time. Right. Like, they've had to read the book.

[Molly McAleer]

Yeah.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

And so when people are angry at book clubs, they're really angry.

[Molly McAleer]

Yes.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Whereas I did a podcast once with a guy whose whole, like, thesis statement was that he never read the books because he was afraid if he read them, he would spoil them during the interview. And it was like a hallucinatory experience. Like, it was just the most bizarre thing, but it was very different. But that one specifically was deeply humbling because they had it at this restaurant, and I walk in, and they sort of rented out the entire restaurant. Wow. So I walk in, my very first event for my very first book, and the owner of the restaurant sees me and comes running over and says, I just wanted to meet you. Your book changed my life. It's the best thing I've ever read. I absolutely loved it. I especially love the part about time travel. And it became clear that he had confused me for the previous month's author. And I just had to stand there because what do you do? I settled on was saying that I had to run to the bathroom and hoping to never speak to this man again. But it was just like. It was a great initiation into the kind of life you have as an author and the many, many indignities of this line of work.

[Molly McAleer]

It's a testament to your politeness. You know, there's another kind of writer who would be like, I said, good day, sir, or something.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

It's a testament to my passive aggressiveness because I go on shows like this, and I sort of just air that laundry every time.

[Molly McAleer]

Well, as a reader, as a civilian, have you ever been a part of a book club before?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yeah, a couple of times. It never works. I don't have that kind of life. I think there's a certain level of baseline stability that you need. And I'm either around all of the time because I'm essentially unemployed, or I'm on The road for months on end.

[Molly McAleer]

Right. Like now?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yeah. I mean, I was gone for two and a half months for this last book, and so it makes it virtually impossible. I have a friend who kept trying to rope me in, and his strategy was just to make the mission statement of the book club more and more condensed. So he was like, okay. He started with the grade books. We're going to read the grade books. That immediately did not work. We were not going to do that. And so he was like, now we're only going to read shorter novels. And then it was like, now we're only going to read short stories. And I think at this point we're down to, like, fortune cookies or something. And I still can't make it work.

[Molly McAleer]

So not a book club person?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Not really, no.

[Molly McAleer]

When we talked to you about your last book, I think you said something about how you were kind of a voracious reader as a young person. Is that right?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yeah, it was. I mean, voracious was one aspect of it, but it was incredibly arbitrary, too. I mean, the notion of working your way through the canon was never something that was gonna be available to me. Where I grew up, culture was heavily, heavily censored. There were no bookstores, and so it was whatever the hell you could get your hands on. And so the first book that I found, really sort of an exotic door opening to a brand new world kind of thing, was Little Women. Because I did not know what the hell these people's lives were like. It was nothing like my life. And so, you know, there's snow, this kind of reverse exoticism. Right. Like, I imagine there's some people who pick up, like, the sheltering sky and feel a certain way. And I picked up Little Women.

[Molly McAleer]

How old are you when you're reading Little Women?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

I don't know. Whatever the right age, whatever the least embarrassing age is.

[Molly McAleer]

Like a preteen situation.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yeah, it was right around then, I think, tweeny. And then it was just like whatever somebody brought back into the country. I mean, at one point, I got a hold of Dennis Rodman's autobiography, and it was amazing with the picture of.

[Molly McAleer]

Him in, like, a wedding dress or something or like, in a.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Well, the scary thing about that book is that the back cover, at least of the hardcover, if I recall correctly, is his bare ass. And so when you're going through customs, you. You're like, oh, my God, I'm gonna get deported. Like, the whole country is. You know, they censor. Not only censor, but, like, you'd get in trouble for this. And so, like, the kind of panic that I imagine kids who grow up on this side of the world have when they're, like, meeting a weed dealer or something, or like, it was me trying to sneak Dennis Rodman's biography into Qatar.

[Molly McAleer]

So were you rereading Dennis Robbins biography and Little Women, or did it inspire in you? You know.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yeah, those books are very much in conversation with one another.

[Molly McAleer]

I wonder if that they've ever been mentioned in the same breath before.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Unless it's by me, I highly doubt it.

[Molly McAleer]

I love. I love this, but I would think that, like, you know, like, when I was growing up, we would go to this kind of beach house place, and it had, like, three books. And so I just read those three books every summer. Were you a rereader of these texts because of the scarcity?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Sometimes, yeah. I mean, I got my hands on the most random book. And I genuinely cannot tell you how this. A ended up in Qatar, B ended up in my hands. And it was Drive. He said, I think it's by Jeremy Lerner. It was a guy who used to be Nixon's speechwriter.

[Molly McAleer]

Yeah.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

And it got turned into a pretty terrible movie, or at least I think it's a terrible. I've never seen it. And as best I can tell, the only other book this guy wrote might have been, like, interviews with heroin addicts. I genuinely have no idea. But it was the sense of just. I don't know what the hell happens in Drive. He said, I couldn't tell you the first thing about the plot, except that it involves a young basketball player, maybe in high school or something like that. I read that book, like, a hundred times. And the aftertaste of it, of just, like, this weird, vague coolness with a little bit of undercurrent of malice to it, remained so strong in my head. And I genuinely could not tell you a single character's name or a single thing that happened in that book.

[Molly McAleer]

Huh. It's just the tone or the syntax or.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yeah. And that remains to this day. I mean, when I talk about my favorite books or when I talk about the books that have meant the most to me, most of the time I couldn't tell you the first thing about, like, a coherent plot. It's very much an aftertaste of just, like, I was in this space after I read it or while I was reading it.

[Molly McAleer]

This is surprising to me because of my prejudices about people who write in different genres. I would think that somebody who wrote novels would like the framing out of the story, would be the hook, but it's the vibe. It sounds like.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

No, that other stuff falls into my category of sort of jealous reading. I read very jealously and I read very vindictively. Like, when there's a good sentence, I'll read it over and over again to try and figure out why and curse out the writer for figuring this out when I couldn't. Sort of thing that happens at the line level for me. I'm a real sucker for beautiful writing. And so you pick up something like, I don't know, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or something like that. I don't remember most of that biology I couldn't tell you about, like, the flora and fauna that is being described, but at a sentence level. I remember going through those paragraphs over and over and trying to think, like, why? Why is this working so well? And why can't I do this? So all of that stuff falls in the sort of jealous reader bucket.

[Molly McAleer]

And that's still, if I'm hearing you right, that's still kind of a shop reading. It's emotional, but it's still you as a writer, as your trade or as your craft. What about, you know, for me, I have to. Because I write and I teach, I have to really work hard to be able to leisurely read, to read as myself as a person. What does that space look like for you? Is it even possible now that you're writing fiction and nonfiction and touring and teaching and all this stuff?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yeah, it's a very weird sine wave at one end of the curve. I'm reading broccoli, right? I'm reading the stuff that I know is going to be good for me. And, like, sometimes broccoli is cooked well, and then sometimes it's absolutely not right? And then I'm just like, I need M&Ms. Right now. And so I fluctuate that way with no sense of shame or sort of anxiety about it at all. One of the things that I've tried to do and try to maintain just because it reminds me of my childhood, is an incredibly arbitrary sort of mode of selection.

[Molly McAleer]

Huh. That's the Dennis Rodman to Little Women curation.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

The Dennis Rodman to Little Women fluctuation continues to this day. I find the one exception is I can't read in the same mode that I'm writing. If I'm writing fiction, not only dystopian fiction, I can't read dystopian fiction, but I can't read fiction, I can't read novels. And so I find myself very much turning back to Poetry and interviews with writers. Because poetry is a beauty of language at a level that I know I can't reach. So there's no jealousy. Right. There's not even, like, the prerequisites for jealousy. And then interviews with writers. Because I need to be reminded why people do this work, because when you're in the middle of it, the last thing you want to do is the work. And so I need to be reminded why other people have gone through this.

[Molly McAleer]

Is there. This is something that we haven't talked about on this podcast yet, but is there an interview with a writer that's either readable or listening that you think is particularly awesome?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

There's one I always go back to, but it's for a very specific reason, and that's the. I think it was in the Paris Review, and it was an interview with James Baldwin, and it was while he was living in France. And one of the really interesting things about that interview is that the interviewer comes from this point of view where he's saying, oh, you're in France. Isn't this an amazing literary adventure? You're following in the footsteps of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Baldwin, trying to say, no, no, I needed to leave the US because they were gonna kill me.

[Molly McAleer]

Yeah. I'm here to stay alive.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Right. I was too angry to be a black man in America. Right. And the reason I tend to go back not only to that, but to many of Baldwin's interviews, including, I don't think this was an interview so much as a conversation, but the one he did with Nikki Giovanni.

[Molly McAleer]

Yes.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Which. The reason I go back to it so often is because I think as a writer, you have some obligation to prepare for the outcome of being misunderstood and having your work misunderstood and how you deal with that. There is no right or wrong way. There is no acceptable or unacceptable, but you have to deal with it. And the way he did, I thought was really, really fascinating because it used it as a vehicle to deliver new insights rather than being defensive or saying, you know nothing of my work, you don't understand. And I've always tried to reach for that. I've never actually reached it, but his interviews in particular. But that one specifically, I always go back to.

[Molly McAleer]

Yeah. He's the kind of interview subject when he talks about writing, he's talking about everything. There's an access point that's just about being a person who's alive and dealing with other people. Even when he's being asked about his work on the Atlanta child murders or Giovanni's room. I wanted to ask you this because you are great at titling like American War is. You read it quickly and then it just says what it is. And then you start thinking more deeply about it. And you know, but it's just four syllables, five syllables. And then one day everyone will have always been against this. It's just a spectacular title. So, as a master titler, Omar, what's a title that you love of a book or a short piece?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

What a great question. I will preempt this by saying that this is one of my favorite stories about American war. When the Chinese edition came out, they didn't like that title.

[Molly McAleer]

No.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

So I knew they were going to change it to something, but I didn't know what. And then I got the copy back months later and they had changed it to Nobody Survives. That's the title of American War in China.

[Molly McAleer]

What do you think about that decision?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

I mean, spoiler alert, I suppose, if you haven't. If you haven't read. Yeah. I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking of titles, and it doesn't mean I'm good at them or anything like that. But I'm fascinated by the construction process. Some of my favorites that come to mind. There's a writer whose name I believe is Khalid Khalifa. He's a Syrian writer, and he wrote this beautiful book, or at least I think it's beautiful. I've not run into anybody who has read it and liked it. Mostly people have no idea what this book is. It's the chronicle of a family's life through 40 years of Syrian society, ending just before the revolution and the real bloodshed of that moment. And so it has this sort of like Russian family saga kind of vibe to it. But it's called no Knives in the Kitchens of this City. I love that title.

[Molly McAleer]

That's good.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

I love that title so much. And then there's a book by. There's a writer named Sarah Peters who's out in Canada and who's criminally underrated both in Canada and in the US her new book comes out, I think, later this year. It's called Mother of God. But her first book, which came. Showed up. You know, this, like a writer's life books kind of just appear.

[Molly McAleer]

Yes.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

And this one just appeared. And I knew nothing about her and I knew nothing about the book, but it's called I Become a Delight to My Enemies. And it's such a. Like a weird, hallucinatory, Beautifully written. I couldn't. Again, I cannot tell you what the hell this book is about. It's a novel, but it is a novel. Yes, but I read that title and I was like, I'm here for it. Let's go.

[Molly McAleer]

I become a delight to my enemies. Did you ever hear that story about Kundera? It's in one of his later works. And he's like, oh, I've got a great title for my new book. It's called the Unbearable Lightness of Being. And somebody was like, no, you already titled something that. And he was like, sorry, I think this works much better for this one. I can't wish I could remember which later.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

This was like pre Google era where you didn't have to worry about search results and SEO and stuff. Right, right.

[Molly McAleer]

Yeah. And I think Fitzgerald wanted to call the Great Gatsby.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Oh, what was this one? Something Egg. Like there was an egg in there, wasn't there?

[Molly McAleer]

I heard it was under the red, white and blue.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Oh, maybe I thought it was like something of West Egg.

[Molly McAleer]

I don't know what Gatsby. It sounds like maybe he went and the fight for the title was all done over telegram. So he'd send a title. There's a telegram in some archive that says, stop, full stop. Crazy about the name under the red, white and blue. But I think the ink was already the first edition. Okay, well, I feel like I'm starting a conversation that could be 67 hours long. But we always end open book asking the same question. Do you have a controversial book opinion or literary opinion or reading opinion?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Usually with stuff like this, I'm like, oh, I'm going to get in trouble. But like, given the content of my last book, this stuff. Yeah, you stop sort of mattering. Right. I think that the laziest and easiest thing to do in literary circles is sound smart and well read at one of these New York publishing cocktail parties. Because there's a certain number of tricks that you can keep in your back pocket that without fail will make you sound erudite and smart and very literary. For example, pick the densest, most impenetrable novel that you can imagine and talk about how you just can't understand why people don't get why it's so funny.

[Molly McAleer]

So the thing that people never talk about with Finnegan's Wake is that it's really very funny.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Molly McAleer]

Okay.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

It's like the Magic Mountain is a riot. Why aren't people getting this? I just don't understand or mention that, like Conrad was writing in his third language or like there's certain pieces of shorthand. And so I have very little respect for the. Granted the Art of sounding smart at literary parties. Because it's all just a bunch of tricks in people's back pockets. And it does a disservice to people who actually know what the hell they're talking about. Because folks like me can wander in, pull out those three tricks, right?

[Molly McAleer]

It's like me in football. Like, I know how to say, there's still a lot of ball to be played, get in the game, refer, lock it up. Like, there are a couple of things that I can say that really, I mean, it's never really failed me.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Yes, it all falls apart if anybody has a follow up question, but if they don't, if you walk away quickly enough, you've achieved what you needed to achieve.

[Molly McAleer]

Are you annoyed enough by people who do this to ask that that follow up question at these parties, or are you?

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

No, I have no faith in my own ability to like hold my own in that conversation, regardless. And so. And also they might actually know what they're talking about, in which case my entire. That's the reason this opinion is controversial is because it could be entirely nonsense. And so I just walk away and keep my passive aggressive sort of sense of disgust at the whole thing.

[Molly McAleer]

Just to your point, I have had so many conversations at those kinds of parties about books that I have not read because I know just enough and I have just enough interpersonal communication skills. And I am a professor at a university, so I really hope no one affiliated with my job is listening to this. I will not say the books that I haven't read, but it is egregious. And I've been able to have a lot of conversations doing the still a lot of ball to be played shorthand about some of the biggies.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

There have been occasions where I, and I'm not proud to admit this, have looked up the Wikipedia entry of authors I knew were going to be at these parties. And that's bad enough, but it was for the explicit and malicious purpose of going up to them and telling them what a huge fan I am of their work. Like, it wasn't even just like, oh, this person might come up to me, I should know something about them. It was because I was gonna go full force and convince this person that I had read their entire body of.

[Molly McAleer]

Work because you'd read like one book or something.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

I had read zero of their books. I barely knew enough to Google their name. But I just have no social skills. And so you need something to carry into that room. And this happened to be it. I'm not proud of it, but I will do it again.

[Molly McAleer]

Well, I think we now know the next time we see you at a literary party. What a.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

You're never gonna see me in a.

[Molly McAleer]

We'll just stay here. We'll just talk about reading in this magical podcast studio. Well, Omar, it was so lovely to talk to you and thank you so much for telling us about your reading habits and come back and tell us more.

[Tiffany Scott Maddox]

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

[Molly McAleer]

That was Omar El Akkad on Open Book. Please be sure to get your hands on a copy of his latest publication one day. Everyone will have always been against [e-mail] thanks for listening to Open Book. I'm Elena Passarello, your host. Our executive producer is Laura Hadden, and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevchenko. Evan Hoffer is our technical director. Hazik Bin Ahmad Farid is our mixer. Awalker Spring composed our theme song, and Ashley park is our social media marketer. A big thanks to the entire staff at LiveWire Radio, the fourth fine folks at PRX, and of course, Powell's Books for sponsoring this podcast. Hey there, Open Book listeners. I hope you enjoyed this week's chat and I've got a little behind the scenes podcasting secret for you. That writer that you just heard. We had our conversation backstage at my other show, Livewire Radio Radio, while they were getting ready to face something way more terrifying than lil o me, a live audience of several hundred people. Do you want to hear your favorite authors talk about their own work and maybe sweat a little? I swear, these live shows are so vivid, so exciting, you can actually hear the guests sweat. Oh, also, do you want to hear music and comedy and other truly unhinged, often sweaty hijinks from Luke Burbank and yours truly? Well then, head on over to livewireradio.org or find us on your favorite podcast app, because the party is just getting started. From prx.