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Authors@Google: Porochista Khakpour

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The Authors@Google program was pleased to welcome writer and novelist Porochista Khakpour to Google's New York office to discuss her debut book, "Sons and Other Flammable Objects".
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Paper, Flaunt, Nylon, and Bidoun, among many others.
Her debut novel "Sons and Other Flammable Objects" received much acclaim from The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. It won the 77th Annual California Book Award in "First Fiction," and was a Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best" selection and a New York Times "Editor's Choice."
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. Darius Adam and his wife, Laleh, flee revolutionary Iran for the alien territory of Southern California, settling in an apartment complex with the allegorically enticing name of Eden Gardens. Son Xerxes grows up with psychological dual citizenship: regular American outside of Eden Gardens, but the son of bitter Darius and clueless Lala inside. Xerxes finds true paradise in watching Barbara Eden, the star of I Dream of Jeannie.
Against this background of a parody paradise, Khakpour plays out the events following 9/11, which will, grotesquely, unite the Adam family. By then Xerxes, 26, is an unemployed college grad in a New York airshaft-view apartment, as far from Eden Gardens as possible.
Khakpour is an elegant writer, and she imparts a perfect sense of the ironies of being Persian in America, where the blurry collective image of the Middle East alternates between blonde genies in bottles and furrow-browed terrorists in cockpits.
Thid event took place on June 24, 2008.

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