Experts
Porochista Khakpour
Author
Recent Activity
full website now, really and truly, up!
http://www.porochistakhakpour.com(aka http://www.sonsandotherflammableobjects.com/)see you all at Red Room (where I am this week's "Rising Star)!"yours, Porochista
August 23, 2008, 7:33 AM
now lives.Buy it hereor hereor hereor wherever!it has a new cover, new blurbs, and a wonderful new reading group guide for book clubs!best of all, it is $14 or less.
August 22, 2008, 2:45 PM
My "real" website, the one I have been promising for months and months is really just days and days away. Very soon it will appear with all sort of fun content. I will keep this blogspot up, but basically I will stop updating here. For more bloggy stuff, I will turn to my Red Room author blog.But for the new website, get your bookmarks ready:http://www.porochistakhakpour.com/ORhttp://www.sonsandotherflammableobjects.com/
August 17, 2008, 1:48 PM
I am late in posting snippets of a wonderful review of my novel in the MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) journal summer issue. It is one of those rare reviews where I love every word!I'm pasting the intro and conclusion---if you must know all the stuff in the middle, buy a copy.Sons and Other Flammable Objects, the debut novel of twenty-nine- year-old Porochista Khakpour, is perhaps the first work by an lranian American to transcend some of the unresolved, persistent themes that have dominated contemporary Iranian literature written in English-namely, post-revolutionary Iranian victim status and the longing for an idealized homeland. . . .Ultimately, Sons does something entirely new in the Iranian literary landscape: it is a sophisticated treatment of the life and problems of one Iranian immigrant family which manages to also be universal. In some ways, its fresh style and obsession with detail may remind readers of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir which achieves the same universal appeal. Khakpour is a master of showing all the nuances of immigrant life, and she is especially talented at depicting the sort of nameless longing for a homeland that second-generation Iranians experience. The solution, Khakpour knows, will not be found in the pomegranate trees, santur music, and the otherwise exoticized Iran of their (our) forbears, an Iran that is more a wispy dream than reality. Rather, the answer lies in coming to grips with the need to forge new identities and homelands, while making peace with Iranian roots.***Also, just got back from the Sewanee Writers' Conference in rural Tennessee. My, what a fun 12 days. I am a bit damaged liver-wise because of the neverending drinking and eating, and I seem to still be thinking in a Southern accent, but I wholly recommend it. I never did stop feeling starstruck in all the many hours of "hang out time" with literary giants like Tim O'Brien and Mark Strand. And though it seems none of us had a moment to pick up a pen, I came to really value how sometimes writers just need to be with other writers.
July 28, 2008, 4:45 PM
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area (South Pasadena, to be exact). Her first language was Farsi, her second (and luckily mostly forgotten) tongue, Valley Girl. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars MA program. She has been awarded fellowships from Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.She began writing as an arts and entertainment journalist—her subjects have spanned from clubs (Paul Oakenfold!) to couture (Paul Poiret!); Maggie Gyllenhaal (Maggie’s first big feature!) to Fabio (Porochista’s first feature at 16!); New York City’s finest drinking establishments (Paper magazine bar columnist, 2000-2001, as well as New York magazine online bar critic) to rural Illinois’s most dangerous skydiving compound (2004 staff writer stint at The Chicago Reader). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, Bidoun, Alef, Canteen, nerve.com and FiveChapters.com, among others.She currently spends a third of her time in New York City and two thirds three hours away in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where she teaches Fiction at Bucknell University.
