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• Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish

  January 6, 2012

  [The Wall Street Journal] Ayad Akhtar’s first stab at writing a novel was a spectacular failure. Friends who read the manuscript, about a poet who does database research at Goldman Sachs, had a uniform response: “Don’t show it to anyone else.” “By the time I got through eight people I said, OK, I’m getting the message,” Mr. Akhtar, a 41-year-old screenwriter and playwright, says. He took their advice and shelved it.

  

  So he wasn’t expecting all the hype surrounding his second attempt, a novel about a Pakistani-American boy growing up in Wisconsin in the 1980s. To his surprise, “American Dervish” was snapped up in the fall of 2010 for a high-six-figure sum by Little, Brown, less than 24 hours after his agent sent it out. It sold to 22 foreign publishers. It’s being released this month in the U.S., Italy, the U.K., India, Australia, New Zealand and Denmark—an unusually broad cluster for a debut novel.

  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203462304577138582345335176.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

  Tags: Arab/American relations, books

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