Lunch with Ayad Akhtar

About the Author

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

About The Radiance

A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture—“bordering at times on the ineffable” (Mary Gaitskill, bestselling author of Bad Behavior).

When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is plunged into a spiritual awakening he can’t tell from madness. In its grip, he’s drawn to a brilliant campus colleague by an uncanny pull, and into a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.

Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.

About the Luncheon

• Doors Open: 11:30 a.m.

• Books: Registrants will pick up their books at the luncheon.

• Guests: Non-members are welcome to attend up to two luncheons per season. Members may bring with them an unlimited number of non-member guests, as long as the guests, individually, abide by the above Non-member Guest policy.

• Registration: Pre-registration is required. 

• Payment: Pre-payment is required.

• Cancellation Policy: Please email contact@miamiliterarysociety.org to cancel up to six days before the event. Refunds or credits will not be allowed for cancellations received less than six days prior to the event.