As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, its founding promises, identity and place in the world are being fiercely debated. As the Festival America in Vincennes gets underway, we're putting that question to two acclaimed novelists: New Yorker Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of "Long Island Compromise", and Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine, whose novel "The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)" won the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction.
Is the American dream still alive? How does America look to someone who arrived there from elsewhere? Has Donald Trump's second presidency changed the American story, or exposed divisions that were already there?
We also discuss the growing battle over books in American schools, with thousands of titles challenged or banned in recent years and ask why literature has become such a political battleground.
And as artificial intelligence raises new questions about authorship, we ask what it means to be a writer in the age of AI, amid the controversy surrounding Canadian-Haitian writer Thélyson Orélien, whose novel "C'était ça ou mourir" has been accused of being written using AI. Orélien denies the accusation.
Read moreCanadian-Haitian writer Thélyson Orélien stripped from Prix Goncourt longlist after AI claims
Watch the full conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Rabih Alameddine and Eve Jackson on arts24.
