Thursday, September 24, 2026
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They say no one reads books anymore. What if the problem is the books? Do you remember the last time you read something that grappled with the Big Questions—about consciousness, and existence, and the nature of men’s souls? Yeah, me either. So allow me to direct your attention to the novelist Ayad Akhtar, who still believes a great novel can change your life. Ahead of the publication of his remarkable new book, The Radiance, he was profiled by our own John Kenney. Check it out below. —Kevin Dupzyk, features director
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Even now, in our so-called postliterate age, can reading a book—a novel, of all things—inspire us to a richer, fuller life? Ayad Akhtar hopes it still can.
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Akhtar first came to wide attention with the publication of his novel American Dervish, in 2012, and a play, Disgraced, the same year. With those two works, and with subsequent plays The Invisible Hand and The Who & the What, Ayad established himself as an artist who, as the searchlight of the country’s attention became trained on the Muslim community, was uniquely able to discern and illuminate essential through lines of post-9/11 American life. His 2020 novel, Homeland Elegies, is a culmination of his investigation of themes of identity, country, religion, family, assimilation, and belonging in America. Two additional plays, Junk and McNeal, addressed particular urgent concerns—money and finance, and AI, respectively.
The Radiance, out September 29 from Simon & Schuster, is Ayad’s third novel, and it is altogether different. It cracks the aperture open wide—about as wide as can be—to take on nothing less than the most timeless and fundamental questions of existence, of how to be in the world. It’s similar to what Ms. Doerfler was getting at, but its expansive ideas are bundled into an engrossing campus novel, braided with a tight plot—a whodunit—and set in a world riven by contemporary cultural, political, and social forces that are familiar to all of us. The book is briskly plotted and deeply absorbing, and at the same time thought-provoking and suffused with ideas of the oldest and deepest order.
Is it possible that even now, with our relentlessly atomized attention spans, our focus fragmented and trained on a dozen existential crises, reading a novel, of all things, can help us live richer and fuller lives, be better people?
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Twenty-seven degrees in a Port-A-Jon, the seat freezing my ass. I’m in the dark with a little flashlight. Chemically treated feces and urine splash up onto my anus. The wind howls, shaking the plastic structure. My hands go numb.
3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach in Westerly, Rhode Island. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’m now living in when a car pulls into the lot, comes toward me. I see only headlights illuminating my fatigue and the red plastic party cup in my hand. Must be a cop. Someone gets out and approaches. It is a cop, young. I’m not afraid, exactly, but I’m also not yet used to being homeless.
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The new Apple TV series, debuting October 30, is a sinister reversal of the cat-and-mouse genre. As it begins, the authorities already have their man. Stephen Graham’s character Jurek Walter was apprehended for a series of brutal kidnappings and murders and is locked within an isolated box deep underground inside a prison psych ward. But somehow the killings and disappearances that were once his hallmark have continued unabated.
The world is full of hideous violence and unfathomable cruelty, but there’s reassurance in the belief that once we identify the perpetrators they can be captured, convicted, and stopped. Nocturne is the rare crime thriller that offers no such comfort.
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