Sep 29, 2026 · 59 min · 12 segments
Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist, author of *American Dervish* and *Homeland Elegies*, joins host Tess Callahan to talk about his new novel, *The Radiance.* The book follows…
Ayad AkhtarGuest
Tess CallahanHost
Especially as the book comes, the full arc of the book, expansion and contraction.
Jonathan Edwards, to come back to one of our great spiritual geniuses in the American tradition, was the presiding personality over the New England Awakening, which resulted in this extraordinary sort of like profusion of religious experience.
People having profound religious experiences, which were then almost systematically and without exception followed by terrible depressions.
The book has this episode, this scene in which, late in the book, the narrator recounts meeting the great Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan when he was a much younger man, which I did encounter him as a younger man in Italy, and a discourse around what Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is talking about when he gets into a state where the music is carrying him to something he gets very close to, gets so close that when it's over, There's this extraordinary sadness, this bereftness.
And that that bereftness is something that he says, you know, he would he used to say in his father actually talked quite about quite a bit about this is it's a necessary condition.
It's the result of closeness to what the narrator will not name, but what they name as God.
Especially as the book comes, the full arc of the book, expansion and contraction.
Jonathan Edwards, to come back to one of our great spiritual geniuses in the American tradition, was the presiding personality over the New England Awakening, which resulted in this extraordinary sort of like profusion of religious experience.
People having profound religious experiences, which were then almost systematically and without exception followed by terrible depressions.
The book has this episode, this scene in which, late in the book, the narrator recounts meeting the great Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan when he was a much younger man, which I did encounter him as a younger man in Italy, and a discourse around what Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is talking about when he gets into a state where the music is carrying him to something he gets very close to, gets so close that when it's over, There's this extraordinary sadness, this bereftness.
And that that bereftness is something that he says, you know, he would he used to say in his father actually talked quite about quite a bit about this is it's a necessary condition.
It's the result of closeness to what the narrator will not name, but what they name as God.
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