Open Book
Episode 5: Omar El Akkad
July 9, 2025
Journalist and author Omar El Akkad (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This) explains why book clubs don’t work for him and how growing up in media-censored Qatar led him to read anything he could gets his hands on — from Little Women to Dennis Rodman’s autobiography. Plus, Omar and Elena bond over the power of the perfect book title.
Show Notes
Omar El Akkad is the author of American War and One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
Omar and Elena discuss the following:
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Bad as I Wanna Be by Dennis Rodman
Drive, He Said by Jeremy Larner
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
No Knives in the Kitchens of this City by Khalid Khalifa
I Become a Delight to My Enemies by Sara Peters
See a comprehensive list of books referenced on Open Book at powells.com/list/open-book-live-wire.
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Elena Passarello: Hi there, I'm writer Elena Passarello, and this is Open Book, a literary podcast from Live Wire Radio brought to you by Powell's Books, where we talk to writers about their reading habits. When I'm not having fun being Live Wire's announcer, writing is my job. I'm the author of two non-fiction books, and I'm currently digging my way through a third project. Please send me all of your good vibes, and also all of you 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 author. We talk about 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.
Elena Passarello: Omar, welcome to Open Book.
Omar El Akkad: 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 nervous I am right now.
Elena Passarello: What do you think about yours? I think your voice sounds great.
Omar El Akkad: So I went and did the audio book 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 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. That's exactly the energy we need for this. So it worked out fine.
Elena Passarello: But I know you also sometimes do some kind of comedy stuff for fun and do you have a kind of like a Stephen Wright approach because your voice has this more low-key quality?
Omar El Akkad: 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. [Elena: Right.] 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. [Elena: Oh no.] 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. [Elena: Right.] And once you cross the uncanny valley, it's just bad. It's just, it's weird in every conceivable way.
Elena Passarello: 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 languishing 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 anguished.
Omar El Akkad: I mean, that one specifically. Book clubs generally are pretty intense because people, you know you've stolen their time, right? Like they've had to read the book. And so when people are angry at book clubs, they're really angry. 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. I think 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. So I walk 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 loved 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?
Omar El Akkad: And what I settled on was saying that I had to run to the bathroom and then 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.
Elena Passarello: 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.
Omar El Akkad: It's a testament to my passive aggressiveness because I go on shows like this and I sort of... air that laundry every time.
Elena Passarello: Well as a reader, as a civilian, have you ever been a part of a book club before?
Omar El Akkad: Couple of times it never works. I don't have that kind of life. Like 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. Right, like now. 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, we started with the grade books. We're gonna read the gradebooks. That immediately did not work. We were not gonna do that. And so he was, like, now we're only gonna read, like shorter novels. And then it was, now we are only gonna 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. [Elena: So not a book club person?] Not really, no.
Elena Passarello: 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?
Omar El Akkad: 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, it was 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.
Elena Passarello: How old are you when you're reading Little Women?
Omar El Akkad:I don't know, whatever the right age, whatever the least embarrassing age is.
Elena Passarello: Like a pre-teen situation.
Omar El Akkad: It was right around then, I think. [Elena: Betweeny.] 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.
Elena Passarello: With the picture of him in like a wedding dress or something or like a...
Omar El Akkad: Well, the scary thing about that book is that the back cover, at least of the hard cover, if I recall correctly, is his bare ass. And so when you're going through customs... You're like, Oh my God, I'm going to get deported. Like the whole country is, 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 grew 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.
Elena Passarello: So were you rereading Dennis Rodman's biography on little women or did it inspire in you, you know.?
Omar El Akkad: Yeah, those books are very much in conversation with one another.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, I wonder if they've ever been mentioned in the same breath before. Unless it's by me, I highly doubt it. I love this. I would think that 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 re-reader of these texts because of the scarcity?
Omar El Akkad: 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 on 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. And he got turned into a pretty terrible movie, or at least I think 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 like undercurrent of malice to it remains 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. [Elena: Huh, it's just the tone or the syntax or?] Yeah, and that remains to this day. I mean, when I talk about my favorite books or when I talked 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.
Elena Passarello: 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 think a lot about, like the framing out of the story would be the hook, but it's the vibe, it sounds like.
Omar El Akkad: No, that other stuff falls into my category of sort of jealous reading. I read very jealousy 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.
Elena Passarello: And that's still, if I'm hearing you right, that's 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 really work hard to be able to leisurely read, to read as myself, as a person. Where, 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?
Omar El Akkad: Yeah, it's a very weird sine wave. At one end of the curve, I'm reading broccoli, right? I've read the stuff that I know is gonna be good for me. And like sometimes broccoli is cooked well and then sometimes it's absolutely not. [Elena: Right.] And then I'm just like, I need M&Ms right now. Yeah. 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 tried to maintain just because it reminds me of my childhood. Is an incredibly arbitrary sort of mode of selection.
Elena Passarello: That's the Dennis Rodman to Little Women.
Omar El Akkad: 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 reading fiction, you know, not only dystopian fiction, I can read dystopian fiction, but I can' read fiction, 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 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 of why other people have gone through this.
Elena Passarello: 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 listenable that you think is particularly...awesome?
Omar El Akkad: 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. I'm here to stay alive. 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. [Elena: Yes.] 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, like, 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.
Elena Passarello: 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, you know, 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 is just a spectacular title. So as a master titler, Omar, what's a title that you love of a book or a short piece?
Omar El Akkad: 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, 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.
Elena Passarello: What do you think about that decision?
Omar El Akkad: I mean, spoiler alert, I suppose, if you haven't.
Omar El Akkad: You know if you haven't read um yeah I I I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking of titles and and it's not 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 Khaled Khalifa is 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 um mostly people I 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. [Elena: That's good.] I love the 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, you know, showed up, you know this like writer's life, books kind of just appear. And this one just appeared and I knew nothing about her and I know nothing about the book, but it's call I've Become a Delight to My Enemies and it's such like a weird, hallucinatory, beautifully written. I couldn't, again, I cannot tell you what the hell this book is about. [Elena: 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.
Elena Passarello: I've 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 wish I could remember which later.
Omar El Akkad: This was like pre-Google era where you didn't have to worry about search results and SEO and stuff, right?
Elena Passarello: Yeah, and I think Fitzgerald wanted to call The Great Gatsby.
Omar El Akkad: Oh, what was this one? Something egg? There was an egg. In there, wasn't there?
Elena Passarello: I heard it was under the red white and blue.
Omar El Akkad: Oh, maybe. I thought it was like something of West Egg, I don't know what the hell.
Elena Passarello: 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 dry on 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?
Omar El Akkad: Usually with stuff like this, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna get in trouble. But like, given the content of my last book, this stuff stops 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 like 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.
Elena Passarello: So the thing that people never talk about with Finnegan's Wake is that it's really very funny.
Omar El Akkad: Exactly, exactly. It's like the Magic Mountain is a riot. Why aren't people getting this? I just don't understand. Uh, or mention that, like, Conrad was writing in his third language. We're like, 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.
Elena Passarello: Right, 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 ref, lock it up. Like there are a couple of things that I can say that really, I mean, it never really failed me.
Omar El Akkad: 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.
Elena Passarello: Needed to achieve are you annoyed enough by people who do this to ask that that follow-up question at these parties or are you
Omar El Akkad: 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, 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.
Elena Passarello: Just to your point, I have had so many conversations at those kinds of parties about books that I have not read. You know, like, 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 haven't read, but it is egregious. And I've been able to have a lot of conversations doing the, still a lot a ball to be played shorthand about some of the biggies.
Omar El Akkad: 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 like know something about them.
Omar El Akkad: Because I was gonna go full force and convince this person that I had read their entire body of work.
Elena Passarello: Because you'd read like one book or something?
Omar El Akkad: I had written 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.
Elena Passarello: Well, I think we now know, the next time we see you at a literary party, what a, uh...
Omar El Akkad: You are never gonna see me at a literary party.
Elena Passarello: We'll just stay here and 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. [Omar: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.; 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 This at powells.com. Thanks for listening to Open Book. I'm Elena Pasarello, your host. Our executive producer is Laura Hadden, and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Eben Hoffer is our technical director. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our mixer. A Walker Spring composed our theme song, and Ashley Park is our social media marketer. A big thanks to the entire staff at Live Wire Radio, the fine folks at PRX, and of course, Powell's Books for sponsoring this podcast.
