Porochista Khakpour
“I have a longing for what is real, even though I know that authentic expression is a dicey operation.”
READ
Watch
“[An] irresistible voice…Compulsively readable…Think the Kardashians meet Little Women and Crazy Rich Asians…An indelible, uproarious snapshot of young womanhood.”
“Wry…[Khakpour] provides a vibrant sense of place and an indelible family portrait. This has plenty of heart.”
“A kind of hyperreal neon inversion of Little Women, if the March girls had to deal with hashtags, eating disorders, microaggressions, and group chats…Iranian and American cultures collide in a shower of glitter and tears in this sendup of the SoCal elite.”
“Khakpour [is] one of our best new satirists, partly because she is never as moving as when she is entirely sincere.”
“Brilliant…. What I love most about Porochista Khakpour’s writing is her voice: always direct, always passionate, always clear and brave, full of compassion and vulnerability, always open to the world. Brown Album is both a manifesto of survival and a lyric journey.”
“In this stirring collection of essays, Khakpour explores her life as a writer and her American experience as an Iranian immigrant, touching on the personal and the political with equal grace.”
“Confusing, exhilarating, terrifying, sad, scary, magical…. This book was balm to my Turkish-American soul, and to my cosmopolitan-writer-beyond-nationalism soul. Every page is overflowing with verve and insight and hilarity and brilliance and sadness and historical and cultural specificity. Porochista Khakpour is a treasure.”
“Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.”
“All of Khakpour’s strengths are on display here: punchy conversation, vivid detail, sharp humor. . .Khakpour brings her characters vividly to life; their flaws and feints at intimacy feel poignantly real, and their journeys generate real suspense. . .they are also imbued with a genuine humanity that wins our affection”
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books, most recently the novel Tehrangeles (Pantheon, 2024), named a Best Book of the Year So Far by Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and W Magazine. Her debut novel Sons and Other FlammableObjects (Grove, 2007) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category.
Her second novel The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Her widely acclaimed third book Sick: A Memoir (Harper Perennial, 2018) was a Best Book of 2018 according to TIME, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, LitHub, and more. Her essay collection Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity (Vintage, May 2020), has been praised in The New York Times, O: Oprah Magazine, TIME, goop, USA Today, and received four starred pre-publication reviews. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others.
Discussing her view of being a writer in America, Khakpour notes, “I think to really be an artist, to really inhabit that, you have to accept on some level that you are not going to belong. Being an outsider, for instance, can be like being an observer.” As a child, she was acutely aware of her “resident alien” and Muslim refugee status. “I remember trying to learn English on kindergarten playgrounds. I tried hard to be a convincing American but it was a losing battle. I was labeled weird and that tag never left me—all through high school, I was always the oddball. It was not always an easy path—I just had to tell myself that one day, being on the periphery would become an asset (and I think it finally has, as a creative adult).” She is also an advocate for those with chronic illness and disability, and speaks frequently on this topic. She has presented at book festivals here and overseas, and served as a judge for various literary awards.
Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and a Yaddo and Ucross fellowship. Currently, she is Contributing Editor at The Evergreen Review.
Born in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in New York City.
Image GALLERY
Open and right-click to download
