{"title":"Author Events Fall 2026","description":"\u003cp\u003eSeptember 10 - Omar El Akkad\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-omar-el-akkad","title":"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This | Omar El Akkad","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAs an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eOne Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/em\u003eBESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] bracing memoir and manifesto.” —\u003cem\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.” —Tommy Orange, bestselling author of\u003cem\u003e Wandering Stars \u003c\/em\u003eand \u003cem\u003eThere There\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA \u003cem\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/em\u003eNOTABLE BOOK • PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM • AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bates College Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49302021505268,"sku":"9780593804148","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0531\/7421\/files\/9780593804148.jpg?v=1788372395"},{"product_id":"the-kitchen-dwellers-testimony-ladan-osman","title":"The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony | Ladan Osman","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWinner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman’s speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bates College Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49302043164916,"sku":null,"price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0531\/7421\/files\/9780803266865.avif?v=1788372789"},{"product_id":"exiles-of-eden-ladan-osman","title":"Exiles of Eden | Ladan Osman","description":"\u003cp\u003ePoems steeped in the Somali tradition refract the streets of Ferguson, the halls of Guantánamo, and the fields near Abu Ghraib through the myth of Adam and Eve to ask: What does it mean to be a refugee?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eExiles of Eden\u003c\/em\u003e looks at the origin story of Adam, Eve, and their exile from the Garden of Eden, exploring displacement and alienation from its mythological origins to the present. In this formally experimental collection steeped in Somali narrative tradition, Osman gives voice to the experiences and traumas of displaced people over multiple generations. The characters in these poems encounter exile’s strangeness while processing the profoundly isolating experience of knowing that once you are sent out of Eden, you can’t go back.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bates College Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49302064496884,"sku":null,"price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0531\/7421\/files\/9781566895446_FC.jpg?v=1788372977"},{"product_id":"earth-7-a-novel","title":"Earth 7: A Novel | Deb Olin Unferth","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWell, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTwo women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBy the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eEarth 7\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bates College Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49302120988916,"sku":"9781644453957","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0531\/7421\/files\/720.jpg?v=1788373341"}],"url":"https:\/\/store.bates.edu\/collections\/author-events-fall-2026.oembed","provider":"Bates College Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}