Authors and best friends Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar are taking to the road to celebrate the paperback releases of their latest novels.
The writers are taking a road trip around the Bay Area in March, with appearances scheduled at several bookstores and a high school, the Knopf Doubleday Group announced in a news release.
Orange’s latest novel, Wandering Stars, was published in paperback this week, while Akbar’s National Book Award-finalist Martyr! came out in paperback in December.
The authors will kick off their driving tour with a classroom visit at the East Bay Innovation Academy in Oakland on March 14; that evening, they will appear at the Booksmith in San Francisco. In the days following, they will head to bookstores in Santa Rosa, Point Reyes Station, Sacramento, Sausalito, and Menlo Park.
Akbar said in a statement that he and Orange helped each other write their latest novels, writing back and forth to each other. “We did that for years, exchanging Friday pages, swapping what Tommy called ‘cheernotes’ on them, just waving our pom poms with genuine excitement at what the other'd just wrought from the ether. I wrote the entirety of Martyr! in those Friday pages to Tommy.”
Orange added, “We like so much of the same music and same loves including basketball and running and dogs and frozen mangos and movies and TV shows and books and the list keeps getting added to it feels our friendship is still growing and I couldn’t be more grateful for it/him.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
