Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) is a novel by the Iranian-American novelist Porochista Khakpour. It is published by New York Grove ( ISBN 9780802118530).
The book depicts the struggles of an Iranian family, refugees of the Iranian Revolution, trying to make sense of their new lives in the United States, in an apartment in Pasadena, California. The main character is the teenager Xerxes Adam. [1]
The history of the nation is embedded in the personal history of the characters, similar to The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat. [2]
The novel won the 77th California Book Award for First Fiction. [3] It was also a New York Times Editor's Choice [4] and included on the Chicago Tribune's 2007 "Fall's Best" list. It was also shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and long-listed for the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize. [5]
According to Kirkus Reviews , the characters are "caught between incompatible worlds, one past and romanticized, the other present but inaccessible." [6] The New York Times praised the novel for its "punchy conversation, vivid detail, sharp humor." [7] Grove Atlantic favorably compared it to Zadie Smith's White Teeth for its "rolling storytelling cadences and wry wit". [8]
The American Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 20 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 35 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than 2,500,000 sq ft (232,258 m2). AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually.
Sadegh Hedayat was an Iranian writer and translator. Best known for his novel The Blind Owl, he was one of the earliest Iranian writers to adopt literary modernism in their career.
The Blind Owl is Sadegh Hedayat's magnum opus and a major literary work of 20th-century Iran. Written in Persian, it is narrated by an unnamed pen case painter, who addresses his murderous confessions to a shadow on his wall that resembles an owl. His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.
Albert James Young was an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. He was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2005 to 2008. Young's many books included novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature.
Andrew Sean Greer is an American novelist and short story writer. Greer received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Less. He is the author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel", and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
Ved Parkash Mehta was an Indian-born writer who lived and worked mainly in the United States. Blind from an early age, Mehta is best known for an autobiography published in instalments from 1972 to 2004. He wrote for The New Yorker for many years.
Lenox Hill Hospital (LHH) is a nationally ranked 450-bed non-profit, tertiary, research and academic medical center located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, servicing the tri-state area. LHH is one of the region's many university-level academic medical centers. The hospital is owned by Northwell Health, the largest private employer in the state of New York. LHH serves as a clinical campus for the Zucker School of Medicine, which is owned by the health system in a partnership with Hofstra University.
Beekman Place is a small street located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood on the East Side of Manhattan, New York City. Running from north to south for two blocks, the street is situated between the eastern end of 51st Street and Mitchell Place, where it ends at a retaining wall above 49th Street, overlooking the glass apartment towers at 860 and 870 United Nations Plaza, just north of the headquarters of the United Nations. "Beekman Place" also refers to the small residential enclave that surrounds the street itself. It is named after the Beekman family, who were influential in New York City's development.
The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The magazine's offices are located near Times Square in New York City.
Homa Katouzian is an economist, historian, sociologist and literary critic, with a special interest in Iranian studies. Katouzian's formal academic training was in economics and the social sciences but he concurrently continued his studies of Persian history and literature at a professional academic level. He began studying the life and works of the modern Persian writer, Sadeq Hedayat, and that of the Prime Minister of Iran in the early 1950s, Mohammad Mosaddeq, while still a faculty member in the department of economics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Having taught economics at universities in Britain and other countries for eighteen years, he took voluntary retirement in 1986 to devote his entire time to Iranian studies. In recent years, he has been teaching and writing on classical Persian literature, in particular the 13th-century poet and writer, Sa‘di. Currently based at the University of Oxford, Katouzian is a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies and the Roshan Institute Academic Visitor in Iranian Studies at St. Antony's College, where for thirteen years he edited the bimonthly Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies. He is editor of the International Journal of Persian Literature, and co-editor of Routledge's Iranian studies book series. He is also a former member of the editorial board of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Comparative Economic Studies.
Porochista Khakpour is an Iranian American novelist, essayist, and journalist.
Clara Langhorne Clemens Samossoud, formerly Clara Langhorne Clemens Gabrilowitsch, was a daughter of Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain. She was a contralto concert singer and she managed his estate and guarded his legacy after his death as his only surviving child. She was married first to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, then to Jacques Samossoud after Gabrilowitsch's death. She wrote biographies of Gabrilowitsch and of her father. In her later life, she became a Christian Scientist.
Pastoralia is short story writer George Saunders’s second full-length short story collection, published in 2000. The collection received highly positive reviews from book critics and was ranked the fifth-greatest book of the 2000s by literary magazine The Millions. The book consists of stories that appeared in The New Yorker; most of the stories were O. Henry Award Prize Stories. The collection was a New York Times Notable Book for 2001.
Thomas Vinciguerra was an American journalist, editor, and author. A founding editor of The Week magazine, he published about popular culture, nostalgia and other subjects in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and GQ.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
The Concert Grove is a section of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York City, that historically functioned as an outdoor music venue. It still serves as a sculpture garden lined with busts of musical figures, largely put up by German American Sängerfest participants and other cultural groups. The Concert Grove also includes the Concert Grove Pavilion, formerly known as the Oriental Pavilion, and adjoins a Lincoln sculpture facing the lake.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2021.
Hushidar "Hushi" Mortezaie is an Iranian-born American fashion designer, artist, collagist, and graphic designer. He co-founded the fashion label Michael and Hushi. Mortezaie is best known for his over-the-top Persian-aesthetic collaged textiles and fashion designs, often exploring glamour, politics, and kitsch. He has lived and worked in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The Iranian Students Association in the United States(ISAUS) was an American national student group for the Iranian diaspora, active from 1952 until the early 1980s. By the early 1960s, the group transformed into a significant portion of the membership of the Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU). The ISAUS was still active during the Iranian Revolution between 1977 and 1978, holding national protests and publishing information against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
{{cite book}}
: |work=
ignored (help)