Omar El Akkad discusses his debut novel, American War, reporting on global conflicts, and limitations of an author’s own experience.
Everyone over the age of twenty is dead. An undiagnosed malady afflicts the population as it ages leaving the world filled with teenagers. So is the setting of Sandra Newman’s new novel, The Country of Ice Cream Star. The novel relies on an invented patois created to by Newman. She discussed the novel at Greenlight Bookstore with Emily St. John Mandel, author of the equally dark dystopian novel, Station Eleven.