Tommy Orange (Wandering Stars) and Kaveh Akbar (Martyr!), literary heavy hitters in the media and BFFs in real life, embarked on a Bay Area book tour March 14–17 to promote their newly released paperback editions. Over the long weekend, Pulitzer Prize finalist Orange and National Book Award shortlister Akbar brought their road show to six independent bookstores and swung by East Bay Innovation Academy in Oakland for a school visit.

The duo started on Friday, March 14, at the Booksmith in San Francisco, spent Saturday afternoon at the Finley Community Center in Santa Rosa at an event hosted by Copperfield’s Books, and played a sold-out gig at Point Reyes Books in Point Reyes Station that night. They visited Underground Books in Sacramento on Sunday and wrapped up on Monday, with coffee and bagels at Sausalito’s Books by the Bay and an evening show hosted by Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park.

Orange and Akbar have been scheming to go on tour ever since they began exchanging work in progress and referring to their friendship as “the band,” Orange said. The reference “related to our sharing of work and being envious of musicians who can jam together,” he explained. “Writers are solo and lonely and don’t get to really collaborate” the way, say, guitarists and drummers do.

Early in their relationship as writing partners, Akbar added, “we started picking words and writing back and forth” spontaneously. Calling their collaboration “the band,” he explained, gave them structure. “We started trading pages at band practice every week,” Akbar said.

“The idea of taking the band on tour was sort of a joke that we thought could be possible,” Orange agreed. When they shared their idea with Jordan Rodman, VP and director of publicity at Knopf, Rodman coordinated the stops and got the tour under way—with herself at the wheel.

Jam Sessions

Orange and Akbar’s friendship began as a classic meetcute in 2019, when Akbar was teaching at Purdue University and Orange was promoting his novel There There. “I was charged with driving him around for his events at Purdue,” Akbar said, so they were making polite conversation.

“At one point, I asked Tommy what the coolest thing that he’d gotten to do on tour thus far was,” Akbar remembered, “and he said that he got to go to a Simpsons table read, to sit in on the actors reading a new script” for the TV show. Akbar, who calls The Simpsons “a bedrock text” for the formation of his cultural literacy, was overwhelmed by a “surge of irrepressible jealousy. And I said, ‘Oh, f— you!’ which is not a thing you’re supposed to say to the person you’re bandying around. But Tommy just laughed so hard, and suddenly we were talking like actual human beings and not talking like two guys at work.”

After Orange’s reading that night, they kept on talking. “My spouse, the poet Paige Lewis, had just published their book called Space Struck,” Akbar said, and Orange misheard the words as “space truck,” which inspired a verbal riff. “An hour after I got home, Tommy sent me a poem that he had written called ‘Space Truck,’ ” Akbar recalled. “Not to be outdone by a fiction writer, I stayed up all night writing my ‘Space Truck’ poem and sent it to him. And he was like, ‘This rules. What’s our next word?’ ”

Orange gave his own account of the “space truck” prompt. “It was a joke, but it was also me asking, ‘Can I learn something from a master of poetry by joking my way into his front door?’” he said. “I told him I wanted him to write a novel, because I knew what he could do with language. I want all of my favorite poets to write novels—I used to say ‘instead of’ poetry, but now I’m saying ‘in addition to’ poetry. There was something about me wanting to understand that better, and him wanting to work with narrative in a way that he hadn’t.”

Orange hastened to add that his and Akbar’s instant bond felt “uncanny. Liking somebody’s writing does not mean you’re going to like the person! It’s probably a 50/50 shot, if not worse odds that the human that wrote the book is somebody you actually want to spend any time with.” To both of their surprise, their musical, comedic, and aesthetic tastes aligned.

“I also think we can’t discount the role of addiction that has been in our lives,” Orange added, naming a key element of his novels representing Indigenous communities in and around his hometown of Oakland, Calif. “This is something that we’re both obsessed with, because it’s affected us in such major ways.”

“There are so many load-bearing psychospiritual symmetries” in the friendship, agreed Akbar. “I don’t want to get too woo, but it feels very lucky to work with someone I admire so much.” He underscored their mutual concerns around addiction and identity, which he examined via Cyrus Shams, Martyr!’s Persian protagonist: “When two people have histories firsthand, or are proximate to addiction, or have their lives shaped by it one way or another, you can bypass a lot of the [small talk about] the weather today, or the Bills in the playoffs—you can talk to each other a lot more quickly.”

Orange and Akbar’s worlds have synchronized in yet another way, Akbar said, because in January, “a writer from The Simpsons wrote to me out of the blue and had read Martyr! and invited me to a table read.” So far, he and his spouse, Lewis, have attended a read via Zoom, and they have an open in-person invitation pending. “The next time I go to L.A., I’ll get to go to the writers’ room,” he said.

The band has more gigs lined up, including one on April 10 at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, and another on April 30 at Kent District Library in Wyoming, Mich. Both Orange and Akbar are working on screenplays for feature films, and they are still sharing work. But for now, Akbar said, “We’re both trying to take care of the people immediately in front of our faces, and prioritizing that."

While acknowledging the seriousness of everyday reality, Akbar also remained ready for play. "I think we should write a collaborative novel one word at a time where Tommy says ‘the’ and I say ‘beginning,’ and get to 80,000 words like that,” he added.

“I think the collaborative novel has not been given its due,” replied Orange. “I don’t know that we would succeed, but with you I’d be willing to try.”