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Description:
A masterful tale of immigrant identity, assimilation, and the
universal struggle of sons to define themselves in the shadow of their
fathers
With rolling storytelling cadences and wry wit that recall Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Porochista
Khakpour, a young writer who emigrated to California from Tehran at age
three, has delivered an extraordinary debut that marks her as a major
and outrageously gifted new voice. Sons and Other Flammable Objects
is a unique and powerful first novel, at once a comedy and a tragedy,
a family history and a modern coming-of-age story with a distinctly
timeless resonance.
Growing up, Xerxes Adam is painfully aware that he is different—with an
understanding of his Iranian heritage that vacillates from typical
teenage embarrassment to something so tragic it can barely be spoken.
His father, Darius, dwells obsessively on his sense of exile, and
fantasizes about a nonexistent daughter he can relate to better than his
living son; Xerxes’s mother changes her name and tries to make friends;
but neither of them offers their son anything he can actually use to
make sense of the terrifying, violent last moments in a homeland he
barely remembers. As he grows into manhood and moves to New York, his
major goal in life is to completely separate from his parents, but when
he meets a beautiful half-Iranian girl on the roof of his building after
New York’s own terrifying and violent catastrophe strikes, it seems Iran
will not let Xerxes go.
A wry and haunting first novel from a fresh Iranian-American writer,
Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a sweeping, lyrical tale of
suffering, redemption, and the role of memory and inheritance making
peace with our worlds.
Praise
“Khakpour builds her luminously intelligent debut around the travails of
an Iranian-American family caught in the feverish and paranoid currents
immediately after 9/11. . . . Khakpour is an elegant writer, and she
imparts a perfect sense of the ironies of being Persian in America.” —Publishers
Weekly
“Sons and Other Flammable Objects is one of those rare novels
that makes you laugh and at the same time breaks your heart. It is a
brilliant, insightful, and original portrait of an Iranian-American
family, mother, father, son, all struggling, often crazily, to belong,
to find meaning in their new home in America, to assert their identities.
All the characters are memorable, lingering with you long after you
finish the last page.” —Nahid Rachlin, author of Persian Girls
and Jumping Over Fire
“Like the young Philip Roth, Porochista Khakpour uses lashing, dark
humor tinged with deep melancholy to paint a wonderfully twisted
portrait of family life. Xerxes Adam, the ‘son’ of the title, is a
protagonist for our times: repulsed by his father and alienated from his
motherland, he hides from his origins in the ashes of post-9/11 New
York. This is a novel of searing intelligence.” —Danzy Senna, author of
Caucasia
“Hypnotic, kaleidoscopic, gorgeous and mad, this novel is a brilliant
and astonishing debut. And the story it tells is the best kind of story—where
comedy and tragedy weave together mysteriously and yet organically, like
a shifting in the play of light, like life itself.” —Jonathan Ames,
author of Wake Up, Sir! and I Love You More Than You Know
“Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a marvelous novel: witty, wise,
continually surprising, continually inventive, exuberant, heartbreaking.
It resists the easy categories of immigrant lit, family saga, first
novel—because it is, first and foremost, a delightful, generous work of
literary art.” —Alice McDermott, author of Charming Billy
POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR was born in Tehran,
Iran, in 1978. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Johns Hopkins
University writing seminars MA program. Her writing has appeared in the
Chicago Reader, The Village Voice, nymag.com, Paper, Nylon,
Gear, Alef, Bidoun, and nerve.com, among others.
http://www.porochistakhakpour.blogspot.com/ |
