![]() ![]() ![]() I was who I was when I wrote it, now I'm somebody else, and I like that idea of constant change. The book takes place at the collision of those two fantasies. Thirty-four year-old Omar wrote American War and then thirty-six-year-old Omar was out publicizing American War, and those are two different human beings and the same thing is happening with What Strange Paradise. I wanted to take a comforting story that Westerners have been telling their kids for the last hundred years, and I wanted to invert it, to tell a different kind of story.” He continues: “At its core, it’s a book about dueling fantasies: the fantasies of people who want to come to the West because they think it’s a cure for all ills, and the fantasies of people who exist in the West and think of those people as barbarians at the gate. “There’s this thing Borges once said about how all literature is tricks, and no matter how clever your tricks are, they eventually get discovered,” El Akkad says. El Akkad explains that he thinks of the novel as a reinterpretation of the story of Peter Pan, told as the story of a contemporary child refugee. ![]() Omar El Akkad’s new novel, “What Strange Paradise,” uses some fablelike techniques to comment on the migrant crisis caused by war in the Middle East. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | How to Listen ![]()
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