Porochista Khakpour

NY Times Summerscapes essay

2008-07-20T00:16:00.000-07:00

A few months ago an editor at the New York Times Op-Ed desk asked me to write a personal essay to kick off their annual Summerscapes series.
And so mine finally appears in print and online today--here!

Give it a read if you have a chance--it's not too long. And the series, which showcases authors' meditations on summer, has in the past included luminaries like Messud, Shteyngart, Ferris, etc. so check the archives for a good time. . .

sneak peak at the paperback cover

2008-07-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

We're a good month away from the pb launch, but just thought I'd give you all a look. You can play "where's waldo" with the new features, some more obvious than others.

prize lists!

2008-07-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

To my own surprise, I was on the kinda long shortlist for the Saroyan Prize!

I am also on the kinda short longlist for the Dylan Thomas Prize!
(HERE and full list HERE!)

My Authors@Google reading

2008-07-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

Whatever, so I giggle, touch my hair, and swear a lot (in writing and in life). There, I beat you to it.

Huffington Post review

2008-06-13T06:31:00.000-07:00

I am kind of amazed that now nine months after its initial publication, S&OFO continues to be reviewed! Yesterday it got a very lovely review from Mike Bonifer on The Huffington Post. Check it out.

california notes, part 1

2008-06-07T18:59:00.000-07:00

There are few things worse than returning home to a heat wave. Oh, be careful what you wish for, I guess: hello, NYC summer!

I just had myself a nice mini-vacation in my beloved native West Coast. The main point of the trip of course was the California Book Awards which happened Thursday evening at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, a very delightful night. . .

I had to actually give an award acceptance speech, which was a first for me. I really didn’t know what to write, who to really thank, what the conventions for such a thing are—and I realized it had to be because the only awards ceremony I had ever witnessed was the Oscar’s, um, on TV. But something told me I was not going to be in tears, thanking God and my parents for giving birth to me, etc. . . anyway I scribbled the thing only hours before, as I played tourist through the various ups and downs--fig- & lit-speaking-- of sunny San Fran. Here I am trying to look over the damn thing, just minutes before I got to the opening reception:

Here I am actually delivering the speech for my “First Fiction” award. I get a little jittery whenever public speaking involves something other than reading from my novel. So I think I giggled a lot, which is what I do when extremely nervous (in case you were wondering if I am just Angeleno-ditzy or pathologically ecstatic):

Here is Michael Chabon getting his award--he and Khaled Hosseini won in the Fiction category. Chabon gave a great speech about the origins of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and feeling he had to justify it as a California book, in some way. I wanted to talk to Chabon and thank him for not just the good lit, but the awesome pro-Obama essay he’d penned.

Here is Khaled Hosseini and I laughing about something as we sign books. Maybe the fact that we both lived in Pasadena? Ha? Actually this could be the point where I told him, “Here, just pass over a pile and I'll copy your signature,” when the line to get to him became absolutely ridiculous. That man has some serious fans.

Anyway, aside from the CBA, my entire West Coast time was splendid. Los Angeles I loved more than ever—I got to go back to all my veggie haunts (Leaf, Real Food Daily, M Café, Govinda’s). I even had three celebrity sightings, which is more for my blissfully ignorant self than usual: Alicia Silverstone (outside Real Food Daily), Jesse Metcalf (outside M Cafe; I blame Perez Hilton for making me know who that is), and James Caan (at the Sunset Tower Bar).

I also finally got to do the PCH Highway 1 drive from LA to SF. It was extraordinarily beautiful, and also extraordinarily exhausting (12 hours, which I mainly blame on the exquisite visual and culinary amusements of Big Sur. I highly recommend the café at Nepenthe and Big Sur Bakery!) If you do that roadtrip, I also highly recommend stopping in the pretty and pretty lazy surfer enclave Pismo Beach and going to Tio Alberto’s for lunch. We had to hear a mini-lecture on Jesus, but it was worth it for the “special vegetarian burrito” and the fresh strawberry lemonade.

Okay, more pics soon, but for now it's AC installation time.

back to Cali

2008-05-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

I am in South Pasadena right now--"home," I guess! I think I will post some pics of my L.A. time when I actually get out of my pajamas and out into my old world. . .

Also, next week, I will be in San Francisco to attend the California Book Award ceremony. Bay-Areans, think about coming! Complete list of winners here and if you want tickets go here.

Tennesseeing this summer

2008-05-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

I will be a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at The Sewanee Writers' Conference this summer!

"The Alcove With Mark Molaro" interview and some more of me

2008-05-17T11:13:00.001-07:00

Also ParsTimes interviews me right after the May 3 Iranian-American writer's conference here.

And I am sure you don't own the rare book I recommend in The Village Voice's summer obscure books round-up here.

Red Room and onward

2008-05-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

I am now also a Red Room author, which makes me think this blogspot-thingy could become useless fast.

This blogspot is also endangered because I will be seriously getting around to building a new website this summer. By "building" I mean hiring a web designer, of course--which, trust me, is a lot harder than it sounds. These are very hard people to pin down to take your money.

If you are a designer of websites that, dare I say it, may actually be interesting to look at and not cost a fortune, then holler at the email on your lower right or comment pronto.

Association of Iranian-American Writers is Born

2008-05-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

Don't let the frightening blurs fool you. Majid Amini, Anita Amirrezvani, and I had quite a lively panel in a whole long day of lively panels last Saturday at the UC Irvine campus for the inaugural meeting of the Association of Iranian-American Writers (AIAW).

Below is a breakdown of the conference, along with a few immediate personal scribbles I made to various panelists.

9:00 a.m. Introductions and Welcome
Nasrin Rahimieh, Maseeh Chair and Director: The only person earth who could pull this off, I am certain. Beholding the workings of your brain was awe-inspiring. Thank you for getting the troops in order again and again--and the lovely Persian dinner at your house!
Persis Karim, San Jose State University: The other only-person-on-earth who could pull this off. Too cool for any school, a brilliant academic one never wants to stop hanging out with.

9:30-10:30 a.m. Fiction and Representations of Iranian-American Identity
Gina Nahai: The veteran. At last, so glad we met.
Parissa Ebrahimzadeh: I am so excited about the future you, the future book, your future, etc.
Haleh Hatami: It was an absolute, wicked joy sitting next to you. Thank you for the giggles!

10:30-11:30 a.m. Fiction in the post- 9/11 World
Chaired by Dina al-Kassim, UCI
Porochista Khakpour: My God, what a genius.
Anita Amirrezvani: Very inspired by your grace and class in person as well as in prose, and so grateful to have you to worry with.
Majid Amini: Mr. and Mrs. Amini, adopt me! I want to live in your 36-hr days.

1:30-2:15 p.m. Innovations in Self-Representation
Chaired by Annette Schlichter, UCI
Sepideh Saremi: will rule the world. I want to know one thing that is wrong with you.
Jahanshah Javid: I didn't get to tell you, but thank you for iranian.com and your intelligent highlighting of its intelligent highlighting.

2:15-3:15 p.m. Writing Poetry
Chaired by Susan Jarratt, UCI
Majid Naficy: We didn't get to meet, but I wanted to tell you your story moved me very much and your courage is quite exemplary.
Esther Kamkar: Tied for best speaker (and not with me either). I want a residency in your brain. An honor to meet you.
Sholeh Wolpe: I had to tell you a funny story, but we didn't get a chance. You are the poetest poetess ever.

3:15-4:00 p.m. Politics of Writing
Chaired by Amy DePaul, UCI
Jasmin Darznik: Kind, intelligent, the works. I look forward to your upcoming book.
Shireen May: Your ideas were bulletproof and I imagine your prose is magic. What fun to chat with you and I can't wait til we see each other again, hopefully in each others' universes as we were scheming!

4:00-5:00 p.m. Future Directions
Chaired by David Goldberg, UCI
Ari Siletz: I could have listened to your speech for the rest of my life. I am a sucker for humor, but I still can't stop giggling about the idea of an Iranian Ayn Rand.
Zara Houshmand: Tied for best speaker, of course. Perfect note to end on. And my idol. So fun to chat with you and again thanks for the kind words.

And there were many others I met who wowed me. . .I know one is not supposed to want to be a part of any club that would have one as a member, but I do with this crew in a big way.

File under "Scary Overachieving Iranians"

2008-04-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

I have taught at the college level since I was 25, but I am a joke compared to Alia Sabur, an Iranian prodigy from New York who, just three days short of her 19th birthday, got hired to become a professor in Seoul. She is now in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Oh, and um, she went to college at age 10.

She is also pretty and nice and not a freakish robot nerd!
Disturbing--I mean, glorious!--details here.

Speaking of great Iranians, I will be joining quite a cast and crew this weekend in California for the inaugural Association for Iranian-American Writers conference. Info here.
Please come if you are able.

The Brooklyn Literary 100

2008-04-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

The Observer's "The Brooklyn Literary 100" is pretty funny, but I have to add I don't live in Park Slope anymore. I live in Kensington, Brooklyn. I am tempted to write on of those "no offense, Park Slope, but"-sentences but nothing. I'll keep my mouth shut. But, yeah, after 3 stints in Park Slope in the last 8 years, I'm now firmly in Kensington. Close enough, I guess, and with every week that goes by, it seems closer and closer. . .

SOFO: California Book Award Winner!

2008-04-16T10:03:00.000-07:00

Today I got a medal in my inbox. Look:

My novel was the First Fiction winner in the 77th Annual California Book Awards!
Some "dudes" (as we Southern Californians say) named Michael Chabon and Khaled Hosseini won in the Fiction category, but did you hear? I won a fancy award with an award night and everything.

Thank you, Cali.

So. . .if you haven't already, succumb and just buy this book, I say yet again.
If not HERE (rather awesomely paired with Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao right now for the price of a book and a half) then at your local indie. But if you are a poor graduate student, please email me or comment. I've found grad comp lit types all around the country have been incredible supportive, so I feel I owe it to you people to mail at least one free book. Just make sure your plea is well-written.;)

Also, I teach.

2008-04-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

I have taught here.
Right now, I teach here. And a little bit here.
And I just found out next year I will teach here.

I thought I should also mention I will most likely forever teach you, wherever you want!
I have been doing the ol' one-on-one teaching/tutoring of the written word in some capacity or another for almost a decade. (A decade ago, just to remind you, meant it was Lewinsky season! I thought I'd earn 6 figures post-college til forevermore! I tutored in in glittery makeup and huge pants! You, not me, said things were "mental" and "sick!")

The point is, in New York I am taking private students (solo or groups) in creative writing (fiction or narrative non-fiction), from now until August. If you want to know more, email me at flammableobjects at gmail dotcom.

Apostrophe Cast reading & interview

2008-04-10T04:04:00.000-07:00

If you don't know about the website Apostrophe Cast, you should. It's a really nicely done bi-weekly online reading series delivered as a podcast, and this week I read an excerpt from my novel and answer some questions.

Flammable In Other Ways: My First Anthology Contrib

2008-04-09T04:19:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should acknowledge that the kinda notorious little story I wrote for nerve.com in 2005 is in their newish Chronicle Books anthology. I have a real love/hate relationship with "The 20 Year Old Virgin," but I have a lot of respect for the writing on nerve.com. My "Bad Sex" contribution was the first after a long stint by their columnist Neal Pollack and it got a lot of attention, more than I would have imagined.
Anyway, it's on their site and visible if you "Search Inside" the Amazon link. It has nothing to do with Iran and my novel, but Sarah Lawrence College and Nineties liberal arts college life!

Speaking of which, I will be reading at SLC's Alumni Reading Night tonight. Details exist a few entries below.

Iranians on Big Think

2008-03-25T06:10:00.000-07:00

The wonderful site ParsArts has some good words about all of us Iranians who are giving more than our two cents at the other wonderful site, Big Think.

Happy Persian New Year!

2008-03-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Rememeber to wish all your Iranian friends a "Happy 1387" tomorrow morning! (For those of us in New York, it means officially at 1:48 am). It's also the vernal equinox, the start of spring--a rather icy grey start in NYC, but still something for everyone to celebrate.

. .

More Reviews. . .

2008-03-15T12:33:00.000-07:00

My novel (lovingly dubbed S.O.F.O. in this here blog), is reviewed enthusiastically in this interesting immigrant lit wrap-up Chicago Tribune weekend piece. Text below (if you can't read the link):

In the first sentence of "Sons and Other Flammable Objects," Porochista Khakpour introduces the dysfunctional relationship of Darius and Xerxes Adam that forms the heart of her engaging novel about an immigrant family that fled Iran after the revolution.

"Another in the long line of misunderstandings in their shared history," Khakpour writes, "what caused Xerxes and Darius Adam to vow never to speak again, really began with a misplaced anecdote ... in the summer of Xerxes's twelfth year, ... known privately to Xerxes's future self as 'the summer in which I realized something was very wrong with my father, something that would cause us to never have a normal father-son bond."

The novel follows their relationship as they go from domineering patriarch and dismissive son living in a Los Angeles apartment complex to two adults on opposite coasts with a gulf between them. When Darius goes to visit Xerxes in New York, their relationship is severed when the father shares a terrible story about his childhood in Iran and the son doesn't respond.

Only through imaginary conversations can the characters express their feelings. Darius has a better paternal relationship with a made-up daughter than with his real child. Khakpour plays with reality and style in her prose, stopping the action of the book so father, mother and son can step outside the scene and explain their thoughts and actions in theatrical asides.

For Darius, life in America is an unhappy, unwanted dislocation, while his wife, Laleh, who changes her name to the easier-to-pronounce Lala, would rather forget their past (readers may wonder what this is, because Khakpour is light on details of what happened to them). Xerxes disdains his parents' culture for its darker side, "a collective tragic disposition, an almost genetic mass pessimism." He prefers his Middle East through a happier lens, the genie-myth-turned-sitcom "I Dream of Jeannie."

Xerxes loves Jeannie for what she is not -- "heavy with the weight of history, harrowing to a western community, a regular on the nightly news circuit." To Darius and Lala, Jeannie is one more thing they don't understand about their son.

Khakpour brings her characters back together after 9/11, when Lala pushes Darius to reunite with his son, and Xerxes' girlfriend, a part-Iranian woman he met on 9/11, sets him on a path to reconnect with his parents and his heritage.

Khakpour, who was born in Iran and raised in the Los Angeles area, expertly captures the culture clash between generations of immigrant families as well as the questions about identity and home that are common themes in immigrant novels. She brings a fresh perspective and style to the genre, exploring themes of escape and being lost and found. The reader may wish Xerxes and Darius had realized sooner that they must address the past to move forward, but the book, and its ending, wouldn't be as satisfying if they did.

**
There is a rather epic feature on "Iranian-American Women Novelists" Gina Nahai, Dalia Sofer, Nassim Assefi, and I in Bookforum this month. Check it out.

**
The Monitor in Uganda reviews my novel! Check it.

kudos to everything but february

2008-03-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

First: I have never been so relieved to see the passing of a month--good riddance, ugly February. Don't ask. . .I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Sarah Lawrence types and friends of SLC: I will be "representing fiction" (as one of my old students once said in a context that made less sense than this one) at the Spring Reading Series's kickoff Alumni Reading Night with poets Matthew Schwartz and Sally Bliumis-Dunn and non-fiction writer Phoebe Damrosch.
Wednesday April 9 @ 6:30
Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville NY
And if this doesn't excite you, one of my favorite writers George Saunders will be there the following week so go to that! Sarah Lawrence has quite a magical campus--particularly exquisite in the spring--so it's worth the Metro-North ride over.

Also I am very excited to see the Brooklyn reading series at Pacific Standard Bar making New York mag's "Best of New York" roundup. Garth Risk Hallberg, the man behind the literary evening, did a great job hosting Josh Ferris and I's inaugural reading in Dec. I had so much fun, so it's very well deserved!

an interview where i talk about absolutely everything

2008-02-18T04:39:00.000-08:00

For the real me, go here.
This interview is the fruit of some weeks of emails back and forth between my dear friend Asad Raza and I. He happens to write for this very cool, smartypants blog 3 Quarks Daily that people like Richard Dawkins and David Byrne love.

Also, remember: I will be at Brooklyn's Pete's Candy Store, reading from something new, this Thurs 2/21 at 7:30. More info here.

apologies--> explanation

2008-02-15T10:49:00.000-08:00

yes, overdue apologies if you have attempted to contact me in the last 8 days or so.
i dropped off the face of the earth and now i am too phobic of my email inbox to properly write people personally. but the explanation is simple and boring: i got the flu. it turned into bronchitis. on top of it, i had a miserable battle with my antibiotics. i have left the house only once in the last week and that was to go to the doctor one snowy evening when, delirious and bawling, i had no other choice.
this flu is no joke. not to be taken lightly at all.
but the lesson was a good one for me. for one week i did nothing. absolutely zero things of value. i floated in and out of the internet. took disturbed naps. tried to read Middlemarch for the millionth time and failed. stared at the wall. played with my cameraphone. thought about things.
a real rehab for a do-er.
so while it was a terrible illness that i hope to never ever again experience--it is definitely the worst of my life--it felt slightly life-altering or something in all that marinating in nothing.
(And "Marinating in Nothing" would be my nomination for the worst title of a story I have never written).

Reading again. . .

2008-02-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

So I lied when I said my McNally Robinson reading was my last.
I mean, I didn't mean to lie--I just didn't know--but I have now been invited to read at Brooklyn's beloved Pete's Candy Store.

I say come. Many know this as the best reading series in Brooklyn, after all.

Thursday February 21 @ 7:30 pm
Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211

Plus, it seems quite likely that I will read something new.

BigThinking about Memory; Psychopedia-ing about Victorian Flatbush

2008-02-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

A portion of my Big Think interview is up. Watch a rather shiny version of me ramble about memory and some other stuff HERE. I had a rather intense interview with them a little while ago and so more from me to come on that wonderful site soon, I am told.

Also, if you care to know about where I live and what (little) I do for fun, check this out. Psychopedia spent a Saturday with me and I gave back by further gentrifying my hood. Fun!