Inside a Book Tour Turned Road Trip With Best Friends and Best-Selling Authors Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar

Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar are on the road between events when I beam into their car via Zoom. They’re both in the back seat, their attitudes upbeat despite the sporadic rain pattering on the roof. It’s the beginning of a four-day rush through the wider San Francisco region, over the course of which they’ll be reading at bookstores, schools, and other gatherings, everywhere from Menlo Park to Sacramento. They’re talking about the high school they’ve just visited, with Orange—an Oakland local—breaking off now and again to give directions to their publicist in the driver’s seat.

“The energy of high schoolers is the most awkward and sweet thing,” he says. “Turn left.”

Akbar nods. “The cool part is the students planned everything. The students had the questions and did the emceeing and the production. It was really beautiful.”

‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar

$18

Penguin Random House

Our conversation turns to the recent political attacks on education and the rising threats against art and culture.

“For every order you hear about,” says Akbar, “there are 50,000 high school teachers working really hard to maintain rigor and creativity despite all the forces acting against them.”

When we return to the topic a few days later, Orange quotes his friend, saying, “As Kaveh has put it so many times, I want to live in a world where there are books.”

It is not unusual for the authors to reference each other’s words and works; they been friends since 2019 (and are mutual appreciators of each other’s earlier publications, Orange’s There There and Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell), and this friendship played an integral role in the writing of their latest respective releases, now out in paperback and hardcover, which have received no shortage of acclaim—Orange’s Wandering Stars was long-listed for the Booker Prize, while Akbar’s Martyr! was short-listed for a National Book Award. The writers sent pages back and forth as they worked on the novels, and according to Orange, “They’re totally different books because of each other.”

“Totally,” Akbar agrees. “I wanted to impress Tommy. I wanted to make Tommy laugh. However esoteric and abstract the idea was in my head, I wanted to make it legible in 10-to-15-page increments so that in some way it was self-contained enough that Tommy could come into it and read it, however disconnected it was from the rest of the book.” And when reading Martyr! with this awareness—with its episodic jumps between its protagonist in New York and his struggling mother decades earlier in Iran—you can see the almost serialized result.

“Working with Tommy, who creates these narrative superstructures where everything sort of clicks and locks into place so elegantly, really helped me to envision characters actually getting through doorways and onto airplanes and how they’re situated in front of each other and what else is in the room,” Akbar explains. “And I think that Tommy’s Wandering Stars gets to be a little bit more trusting in associative ligatures without so much because this, then this. I think it’s very lyric in how it moves.”

“Kaveh is team poetry and I’m team novel,” says Orange, “and we were both trying to recruit each other for each other’s teams, then realized we could play for both.” He relates how an early draft of Wandering Stars featured more action-oriented elements, as his original conception was “more muscular in its movement.” The book follows a Native American family through generations of turmoil, and Orange initially planned on including a thrilling heist segment. “But ultimately I wanted to write a different book—something that had more to do with language and less to do with the what’s happening of it.”

“You wanted to write a more muscular book,” Akbar says, placing a hand on Orange’s shoulder, “until you remembered that the heart, too, is a muscle.”

It’s day three of the tour, and they’re sitting in the car outside Sacramento’s Underground Books, launched in the early 2000s by a nonprofit founded by ex-NBA player Kevin Johnson, who sought to open the store following the closure of the neighborhood’s only library.

‘Wandering Stars’ by Tommy Orange

$18 $17

Bookshop

“We talked about trading pages weekly as like, this is the band,” Akbar explains from the passenger seat between bites of a Bavarian pretzel. “The idea was that writers don’t get to play music together like musicians do, and this is a version of that. So what does the band do? They go on tour.”

“It’s like we have solo albums,” Orange elaborates from the back, “but we do something totally different when we’re together.”

“We’re like the Traveling Wilburys right now,” Akbar agrees. I reference the Blues Brothers, and he nods. “I’m the [John] Belushi—the silly Billy—and Tommy’s the straight man, [Dan] Aykroyd.”

That seems about right. I wouldn’t describe either as reserved, exactly, but Akbar’s speech tends to tumble out peppered with humor, whereas Orange has a more serious tone even when he’s joking.

“We played basketball yesterday in Point Reyes,” Akbar says when I ask if they’ve had time to enjoy themselves between all the bouncing from place to place. “That didn’t feel like bouncing.”

“The ball was bouncing,” Orange says.

“This fucking guy!” Akbar exclaims. “Most of what we’re doing is hanging out. The parts where we’re talking into microphones in front of groups of people are rewarding and gratifying in a very different way, but I just love being around Tommy and getting to ride around with him and listen to music and talk about what’s on the playlist.”

The playlist—titled “Band on the Run”—is eclectic, spanning Souls of Mischief, Dirty Art Club, Gilla Band, Vince Staples, INXS, Liars, Hieroglyphics, T. Rex, Alice Coltrane, Hank Williams, and beyond. Music is a frequent topic over the course of our several days of conversation, as is basketball. If the two authors are a “band,” then they are also a team. At the end of the tour, they will see their respective favorite teams face off: the Milwaukee Bucks (Akbar) versus the Golden State Warriors (Orange).

“It happens once a year that the Bucks play in San Francisco, and that happens to be on the last day of our tour,” says Akbar. “Like everything was planned. The serendipity…”

Such coincidences have played no small part in the authors’ collaborations.

“If you look at Tommy’s and my lives on paper, there are maybe superficial differences,” Akbar explains.“But if you look at our deep internal vibrations, you find a lot of uncanny harmonies and crazy concurrences and confluences, and it comes up in the writing too. There’s just so many overlapping realms of interest, whether it be history, mortality, spirituality, addiction, music, or basketball.”

They’re on their way to the final event in Menlo Park, and Orange points to a Rollerblader zipping along the road and mentions that he nearly pursued a career as a professional blader instead of writing. Akbar follows this with how he almost took a divergent path of his own, which would have seen him abandoning poetry in favor of trying his hand as a writer for The Simpsons. As it turns out, it was The Simpsons that brought the two authors together when Orange visited Purdue University to participate in a table read for the show; Akbar was working at the school and tasked with driving the author around.

“Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar would do anything to be on The Simpsons,” Akbar declares. “I’ll scrub toilets at Simpsons HQ or whatever.”

“We just hit it off right away,” says Orange. “We came to each other as admirers of each other’s work, but actually becoming friends happened very organically. We never told the other person, ‘Hey, I’m sending you pages and I really need this or that.’ I feel like we weren’t angling for coaching or feedback. It was really like, ‘Here’s some pages—I think it’s probably bad.’ And the response would be like, ‘You’re crazy—this is why it’s not bad.’”

Akbar nods. “Not like, ‘I’m so brutally honest with you and I’m gonna tell you why this sucks, even though everyone else is telling you why it’s good.’ I think, actually, it’s much easier to get that in the writing game than it is to get someone to tell you like, ‘Oh, wow! I had this really incredible, profound, transcendent experience reading this, and it moved me immeasurably because of this and this and this craft element. Because of what you did here with the language, I felt this. It’s really difficult actually to get that sort of feedback in writing.”

“There was a lot about language and what to do with it,” says Orange. “That was part of the conversation always, and the love of language that drives us to writing.”

“We both wrote when no one gave a shit that we were writing it,” Akbar agrees. “It’s dope that people are talking to us about it now, but it’s also a thing that we would be doing even if no one cared about it. It’s fun to have a low-stakes way of playing the language game with one of your best pals.”

Amidst this talk of language I mention Donald Trump’s just-announced executive order stripping resources from museums and libraries, and our discussion turns grim.

“I take a lot of solace in the notion that these kinds of attacks are utterly precedented,” says Akbar, “and also in that the art form I have chosen is perhaps the most democratic. You don’t need paints or clay or a kiln to make language art. You just need a functional mind. Anna Akhmatova wrote her poems, memorized them, and burnt them so that Stalin’s police wouldn’t find them. Nazim Hikmet wrote the vast majority of the poems that we know in a Turkish prison. Phyllis Wheatley wrote poems within the bondage of slavery.”

Orange mentions the poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, who had his manuscripts smuggled out of Cuba.

“So there are all of these artists whose work and living affirms the sanctuary of the imagination,” says Akbar. “It makes sense that a fascistic regime would try to erode education and access to the arts, because education and access to the arts teaches one critical thinking, and an uneducated electorate is more compliant, is more able to be convinced to vote against their own best interests. So it’s a perfectly rational set of plays that they’re making from their perspective. But you know—there’s a pretty long history of art persisting despite and because of such fascistic interventions, and I have faith that it will continue to.”

One need not look far to find examples, for the repression of art and culture has happened in the United States before, to the Native American peoples—a topic Orange (who is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes) has dealt with through his writing.

“While they stripped language and culture with the purpose of assimilating natives into erasure,” he explains, “the testament of indigenous people in this country and all over the world is that despite all of it, there are aspects that survive, and in some ways are strengthened by the resistance and survive in a different way because of the hardship. And I think art—great art—comes from that same tension. It doesn’t exist within the most comfortable and well-funded areas. It comes because we have all of this complexity going on.”

“You don’t find a lot of great art produced by kings,” says Akbar. “You know what I mean?”

Suddenly a vivid double rainbow materializes in the distance, and the car erupts with exclamations of awe. This unexpected imposition of color and beauty breaks the serious mood.

“For now, I don’t need to look past this drive,” Akbar says. “We’re gonna go to this gig and we’re gonna get to meet a lot of people and we’re gonna sign some books. And that’s gonna be dope.”