#Porochista Khakpour

[yourdailyqueer]

Porochista Khakpour

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual / Queer

DOB: 17 January 1978 

Ethnicity: Iranian

Nationality: American

Occupation: Writer, journalist, professor

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Parsnips in Love: A Short Story

By Porochista Khakpour.

Design by Jeff Miller.

[halfstayed]

poor things // musings on the body (via @metamorphesque)

Ilya Kaminsky, Antonio Porchia (translation by W.S. Merwin), Warsan Shire, Porochista Khakpour, Anna Akhmatova (translated by Judith Hemschemeyer), Shruti Swamy

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

💖 Sapphic Books Coming Out June 2024

🩷 There's something especially sweet about a sapphic romance. Here are only a few of the amazing sapphic books hitting shelves in June 2024. Which ones are you adding to your ever-growing TBR?

💖 Which ones are you adding to your TBR?

Contemporary 💖 But How Are You, Really - Ella Dawson 💖 Hot Summer - Elle Everhart 💖 Pony Dakota - Nat Burns 💖 Wish You Weren't Here - Erin Baldwin 💖 Something to be Proud Of - Anna Zoe Quirke 💖 London on My Mind - Clara Alves, Nina Perrotta (translator) 💖 Please Stop Trying to Leave Me - Alana Saab 💖 Looking for a Sign - Susie Dumond 💖 Triple Sec - T.J. Alexander 💖 Pages from the Book of Broken Dreams - Kat Jackson 💖 Director's Cut - Carlyn Greenwald 💖 Furious - Jamie Pacton, Rebecca Podos 💖 Cicada Summer - Erica McKeen 💖 Tehrangeles - Porochista Khakpour 💖 Women - Chloe Caldwell 💖 Experienced - Kate Young 💖 Liddy-Jean Marketing Queen and the Matchmaking Scheme - Mari SanGiovanni

Paranormal/Horror 💖 The Pecan Children - Quinn Connor 💖 Private Rites - Julia Armfield 💖 The Deep Dark - Molly Knox Ostertag 💖 The Science of Ghosts - Lilah Sturges, El Garing (ill.), Alitha Martinez (contrib.) 💖 Wolfpitch - Balazs Lorinczi

Fantasy 💖 Mirrored Heavens - Rebecca Roanhorse 💖 The Fire Within Them - Matthew Ward 💖 Digging for Destiny - Jenna Jarvis 💖 Saints of Storm and Sorrow - Gabriella Buba 💖 Markless - C.G. Malburi 💖 Sleep Like Death - Kalynn Bayron 💖 The Afterlife of Mal Caldera - Nadi Reed Perez 💖 The Pale Queen - Ethan M. Aldridge 💖 The Unrelenting Earth - Kritika H. Rao 💖 Ballad for Jasmine Town - Molly Ringle 💖 Six of Sorrow - Amanda Linsmeier

Historical 💖 A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence - Jess Everlee 💖 A Divine Fury - D.V. Bishop 💖 The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye - Briony Cameron 💖 Hall of Mirrors - John Copenhaver

Mystery/Thriller 💖 One Killer Problem - Justine Pucella Winans 💖 The Last Note of Warning - Katharine Schellman 💖 Shanghai Murder - Jessie Chandler 💖 And Then There Was One - Michele Castleman

Sci-Fi 💖 Lady Eve's Last Con - Rebecca Fraimow 💖 The Stars Too Fondly - Emily Hamilton 💖 Moonstorm - Yoon Ha Lee 💖 You're Safe Here - Leslie Stephens

[therumpus]

The Mini Interview with Porochista Khakpour

By Yasmin Roshanian

I first encountered the works of Porochista Khakpour in 2014. As an MFA candidate at Columbia, I was eager for Iranian-American voices in fiction. To read Khakpour is to carefully parse through works of fiction and nonfiction that unfurl family, identity, and Persian myth—I can remember devouring Khakpour’s second novel, The Last Illusion, feeling unburdened. She is a rare writer, and to see life and the Iranian-American experience through her astute and caring pages feels something akin to landing.

In Tehrangeles (Pantheon Books, 2024), Khakpour’s latest novel, the world she satirizes makes for a delightful romp. We meet the Milani’s, a filthy rich family living the (Iranian)-American dream. Al, the immigrant father, is a bombastic junk food tycoon. His wife, Homa, is reeling. As they raise their four daughters (Violet, Roxanna, Mina, and Haylee) in the terrain known as “Tehrangeles,” the splashy landscape of Los Angeles where Iranian-Americans reside (and thrive), the opportunity for their very own reality show slowly snaps the scaffolding of a home, unraveling everything inside.

It was a joy to speak with Khakpour over a Zoom call in May. We discussed the whirlwind of Tik Tok, identity erasure, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

***

The Rumpus: I want to unpack the absurdity of celebrity culture, and in particular, the terrain that has become influencer culture. Did you always want to write a novel about this world? What was appealing to you about exploring celebrity and social media?

Porochista Khakpour: I’ve always been very obsessed with pop culture. Anyone who follows my social media knows. Even if it's not about my writing, or my literary interests, I’m always commenting, or tuned into pop culture. I’m forty-six, and I think I’m pretty up on things that Gen Z knows about. That’s just always been my interest. Most of my books do have some pop cultural angle in them, but Tehrangeles is the most absorbing. I think I had to get to a place, and maybe it took my fifth book, where I wasn’t so concerned about sounding smart. I’ve already written the smart books; the deep and heartbreaking books. I don’t feel like I have to prove myself as much anymore. If I had done Tehrangeles as my fist book, I think I would have been too worried about it being called a beach read or being labeled as women’s fiction. I would have had all of these other insecurities. Tehrangeles allowed me to not only investigate the Iranian-Americans of that demographic, but it also let me get deep into this world of bubbly, frothy trash. I guess some people might call it guilty pleasures, but it sounds absurd to say that—it's such a big part of American culture.

The book is kind of a period piece, too. It takes place in the first half of 2020, and I had to dive deeply into the world of TikTok. I was already on TikTok for a while before that, and I’ve only started posting publicly there recently, but I've been lurking for ages. It’s an amazing place to go when you’re interested in pop culture and celebrity and all that, and it introduced me to the world of content creators and influencers. This aspect of contemporary pop culture allowed me to paint the characters in a deeper way. These girls are just children, really; they’re Gen Z, but they all have jobs that they take really seriously. They’re making money, even though they have money.

Rumpus: I appreciated the versatility on the page. The humor is electric and sharp, and the dialogue is so astute. At the same time, the novel is deeply poignant. You also include a section written entirely in Farsi, allowing us to further access the characters despite the boundaries of language. In terms of craft, what does it mean to use different threads to tell a story?

Khakpour: Iran is really important when I’ve been grappling with Iranian-American life. I haven’t been able to return to Iran since I was a young child. I was born there, and I lived there for several years, but I don’t ever really feel comfortable writing a work set in Iran. I only have limited knowledge of that. Obviously, I can imagine it, but it’s not enough for me. There are many writers who do that a lot better than me; who write very directly from that experience. Iran, in almost all my books, becomes a symbol of an impossibility. It’s always tied to yearning, and longing, and characters wanting to go back to a homeland that they’re separated from. I wanted there to be a real distance between Iran and Iranian-America. In the novel, there are moments where I have relatives and friends in Iran calling the family, and telling them that they’ve heard about certain events in the US, and their show, and I wanted the Iranians to be different from the family. I wanted there to be this really big cultural divide. That was important to me. 

I didn’t think that I would get away with the section written in Farsi, either, but my publishers didn’t touch that at all. In fact, we just had this funny situation where we have a wonderful, well-known actress who’s Iranian-American doing the audiobook. She only speaks some Persian, and she felt that her Persian wasn’t good enough to read that whole section out loud. So, as we speak, my mother is in a recording studio in LA, reading the mother’s (Homa) part that was all written in Farsi. My dad, too, helped me write that part, because I didn’t want it to sound like my Persian. I could have written it in my Persian, but I wanted it to sound like someone of a different generation writing a little section on Iran, and nature, and things like that. I had my dad do a lot of it, and now my mom is reading it. It’s kind of a weird and unique thing for an author of books. 

Rumpus: The last two books you published, Sick and Brown Album, were incredible works of nonfiction. How did it feel to revisit fiction? Was it muscle memory?

Khakpour: I love fiction. Fiction has always been my true love, and I would have never been a writer if it weren’t for fiction. It was writing nonfiction that felt a little bit like tourism. I was working on Tehrangeles the whole time through all of these books, and I thought that Tehrangeles was going to be my second novel. It's funny, though—my nonfiction is more popular than my fiction. It’s always been like this. The amount of readers my memoir Sick had is more than all of my books combined. The success of that book was slightly frustrating for me, because it kind of proved what I was worried about—ultimately, my greatest function for people was as a nonfiction writer. It’s nice to go back to fiction, though, to remind people that this is what came first and foremost, and what I will always think of most as writing. As art, really. Nonfiction as art feels a little bit secondary for me, even though the greatest nonfiction, of course, incorporates all of those craft elements that create great art. I compartmentalize pretty heavily, and it’s just a totally different mode to be writing in nonfiction. I just try to handle that in a much more straightforward way.

Rumpus: This is also one of the first novels I’ve read that incorporated the pandemic. It plays a large role in the story, forcing the characters to confront various aspects of themselves, and each other. I’m curious about what it meant to revisit those early months of lockdown, and how it functioned in this setting.

Khakpour: I’m someone who is interested in things right after they happen, and I want to read about life as it happens. There was a challenge, though, in writing a funny book about the pandemic. I wanted the book to obviously be satire, and to be fun, but my real life experience of the pandemic was purely horrific. I lost seven friends. I lived in Queens, New York, which was very hard hit. As I was working on this book, the soundtrack was just nonstop ambulances 24/7. I felt like I did with 9/11; I was in the center of the hard hit area, and it was very disturbing. 

Ultimately, I was a character that doesn’t really exist in the book. Maybe Mina, to some degree. Mina is longing for a communal experience, and she’s trying to educate her family. And then you have someone like Roxanna, who does my worst nightmare, which is throwing a super-spreader party. That was also a fun climax for me. A book that has a super-spreader party as its climax seemed thrilling, because the odds of me ever being in that situation were zero. Then there’s someone like Haylee, of course, who is so young, and so impressionable. She basically loses her mind during the pandemic. She goes down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, and ultimately becomes MAGA. In looking at Iran and some of the responses with Gaza, people are seeing the conservative Iranians very visibly right now. Right in UCLA—the heart of Tehrangeles—the aggressors tearing apart encampments are conservative Iranians. There’s an assumption that the proper position as an Iranian is to be anti-Palestinian, which is insane. Their own internalized Islamophobia is such that it has to take any position that’s very anti-Iran. There’s a feeling that the family is kind of Republican, or Republican-adjacent, but Haylee is very blatantly conservative. It’s to the point where she keeps arguing with her sisters that she’s white, and Haylee wants to identify as white. Ultimately, she was one of my favorite characters to write, because she was just so different. I could write horrible things. That experience of writing things that you’re just so opposed to; that are so insulting to your total soul—in a sense, it was kind of thrilling. Writing her, and then trying to find a way to save her—it was a difficult tightrope act.

Rumpus: I want to explore identity erasure. With Roxanna in particular, we see what it means to reject her Iranian-ness completely. 

Khakpour: I think the whole thing about Roxanna pretending to be an ethnicity that she’s not, which is the dramatic tension in her arc, is pretty real. People may think I made that up. It’s very surreal, and how could that really happen? But there are a lot of Iranian youth, I think, who pretend to be an ethnicity that they’re not, because Iranians often do have the luxury of passing for lots of things. 

In all of our lifetimes, whether you're Gen Z, Gen X, or even a boomer—you know that there’s been a lot of anti-Iranian sentiment. This is especially true in the West, but it occurs everywhere. Even throughout the Middle East there is so much anti-Iranian sentiment. It’s very tempting for young people that are already very concerned about issues of identity to then just take that leap over there. I wanted Roxanna to be in this pickle where she’s built this other identity for herself, and it works perfectly that her last name works with it; her dad’s occupation, the fact that the sisters are spaced out in school… everything works out until the idea of reality hits. And that’s kind of a funny thing. We’re talking about reality TV, but we’re also just talking about reality. Suddenly, you have to be really real. Reality TV, of course, wants to exaggerate and embellish the real elements. How can they not talk about ethnicity? Now she’s just in a state of absolute terror about what she can do to make that work, and in the end, it kind of becomes a non-issue. Nobody cares that much, but to her, it’s the end of the world. There’s this whole reckoning with her boyfriend, who is Italian, and then it’s his forgiveness of her in the end, and what that all means… I think that it was a good conceit for a piece of fiction. And I think it’s also a very real thing. I think almost every Iranian I’ve ever known—whether for issues of protection, or whatever it could be—has pretended to be someone they’re not. I’ve done it before; certainly around the 9/11 era. There were times where I felt unsafe. I would say that I was Italian. I think it’s pretty understandable, even though it's extremely comical.

*** 

Yasmin Roshanian is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, BOMB, Catapult, and elsewhere. She is at work revising a novel surrounding Iranian-Americans as they navigate college during the onset of the Obama Administration.

[otherpplnation]

929. Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour is the author of the novel Tehrangeles, available from Pantheon.

Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She is the critically acclaimed author of two previous novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion; a memoir, Sick; and a collection of essays, Brown Album. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, and many other publications. She lives in New York City.

***

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[jd-heyman]

Hello Smarty, It's Your Book Wag!

Claire Messud, Martin Dugard, Porochista Khakpour, Gail Godwin, Paul Tremblay, and More...

Dear Wags,

I think of these columns as letters to you. I’m not always the most faithful correspondent, but recently, I was reminded of the power of letter-writing. First, I interviewed the brilliant novelist Claire Messud, and then, I dove into Beyond the Mountains, an upcoming memoir by Deja Vu Prem, which features rich descriptions of missives shared between overseas friends. How exciting it all was, back in the Pleistocene Epoch, getting airmail.

Messud’s latest book, This Strange Eventful History, fictionalizes the journey of her family from 1930s Algeria to contemporary Cambridge, Mass. Since most of the adventure’s heroes have left this world, she was unable to interview them. However, she had an archive of documents, photos, and most importantly, letters to draw from. During our chat, she discussed what made them so special.

Read more - https://jdheyman.substack.com/p/hello-smarty-its-your-book-wag

[zenlesszonezero]

[metamorphesque]

— Porochista Khakpour on Learning to Own the Discomfort of the Body

[text ID: To find a home in my body is to tell a story that doesn’t exist]

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

🌸 Books for AAPI Month

❤️ Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with this list featuring some of the FEW empowering, vibrant stories written by AAPI authors or starring AAPI protagonists.

🌸 What books did you read for AAPI month?

✨ 2024 Releases ❤️ Night for Day - Roselle Lim 🌸 The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years - Shubnum Khan 🏮The Great Reclamation - Rachel Heng ❤️ Lies and Weddings - Kevin Kwan 🌸 Valley Verified - Kyla Zhao 🏮 The Catch - Amy Lea ❤️ Your Utopia - Bora Chung 🌸 Tehrangeles - Porochista Khakpour 🏮 Horse Barbie - Geena Rocero ❤️ Memory Piece - Lisa Ko 🌸 The Fetishist - Katherine Min 🏮 Real Americans - Rachel Khong ❤️ The Kamogawa Food Detectives - Hisashi Kashiwai 🌸 Manila Takes Manhattan - Carla de Guzman 🏮 The Last Phi Hunter - Salinee Goldenberg and Ilya Nazarov ❤️ May the Best Player Win - Kyla Zhao 🌸 Are You Nobody Too? - Tina Cane 🏮 The Design of Us - Sajni Patel ❤️ Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop - Hwang Bo-Reum 🌸 Heir - Sabaa Tahir 🏮 Maya's Laws of Love - Alina Khawaj ❤️ Midnights with You - Clare Osongco 🌸 Vilest Things - Chloe Gong 🏮 This Place is Magic - Irene Te ❤️ Guilt and Ginataan - Mia P. Manansal 🌸 Icon and Inferno - Marie Lu 🏮 Calling of Light - Lori M. Lee ❤️ Bite Me, Royce Taslim - Lauren Ho 🌸 Rules for Rule Breaking - Talia Tucker 🏮 What's Eating Jackie Oh? - Patricia Park ❤️ How to End a Love Story - Yulin Kuang 🌸 Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White - Amélie Wen Zhao 🏮 This Is How You Fall in Love - Anika Hussain ❤️ Just Playing House - Farah Heron 🌸 The Boyfriend Wish - Swati Teerdhala 🏮 A Tempest of Tea - Hafsah Faizal

✨ Romance ❤️ Dating Dr. Dil - Nisha Sharma 🌸 King of Wrath - Ana Huang 🏮 The Kiss Quotient - Helen Hoang ❤️ Girl Gone Viral - Alisha Rai 🌸 Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors - Sonali Dev 🏮 Role Playing - Cathy Yardley ❤️ The Hurricane Wars - Thea Guanzon 🌸 Ayesha at Last - Uzma Jalaluddin

✨ Fantasy ❤️ She Who Became the Sun - Shelley Parker-Chan 🌸 Babel - R.F. Kuang 🏮 Daughter of the Moon Goddess - Sue Lynn Tan ❤️ The Deep Sky - Yume Kitasei 🌸 The Jasmine Throne - Tasha Suri 🏮 Kaikeyi - Vaishnavi Patel ❤️ Light from Uncommon Stars - Ryka Aoki 🌸 Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

✨ Mystery ❤️ Arsenic and Adobo - Mia P. Manansala 🌸 Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers - Jesse Q. Sutanto 🏮 The Cartographers - Peng Shepherd ❤️ Miracle Creek - Angie Kim 🌸 A Disappearance in Fiji - Nilima Rao 🏮 The Leftover Woman - Jean Kwok ❤️ The Widows of Malabar Hill - Sujata Massey 🌸 Things We Do in the Dark - Jennifer Hillier

✨ Young Adult ❤️ The Wrath and the Dawn - Renée Ahdieh 🌸 All My Rage - Sabaa Tahir 🏮 Forget Me Not - Alyson Derrick ❤️ Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating - Adiba Jaigirdar 🌸 These Violent Delights - Chloe Gong 🏮 This Book Won't Burn - Samira Ahmed ❤️ American Betiya - Anuradha D. Rajurkar 🌸 Dragonfruit - Makiia Lucier

[newyorker]

Porochista Khakpour’s deliberately unheroic “Sick” raises questions about what we expect of female patients with chronic illness.

[skylightbooks]

Here is a collection of reviews for Porochista Khakpour’s brand new memoir, SICK. We are thrilled to be hosting her on tour this coming Wednesday, June 20th, in conversation with Mira Gonzalez <event link>

READ ABOUT SICK ON

Women’s Review of Books

Bitch Media

Guernica

Longreads

Electric LIt

Vogue

Los Angeles Review of Books

Publishers Weekly

Tin House

AV/AUX

Kirkus

The Rumpus

Slate

The New Yorker

Paper Mag

The Furious Gazelle

Pacific Standard

Berfrois

Sick has made Oprah.com’s Top Books of Summer, The Washington Post’s What Your Favorite Authors are Reading This Summer, The Boston Globe’s 23 of the Most Anticipated Book of 2018, Buzzfeed’s The 33 Most Exciting New Books of 2018, Bustle’s 28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 and Best Nonfiction In June, Nylon’s 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 and 46 Great Books to Read This Summer, Electric Literature’s46 Books to Read By Women of Color in 2018, HuffPost’s 60 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018, Bitch’s 30 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018, Refinery29’s Best New Books to Read This Month, AV Club’s 5 Books to Read This June, The Rumpus’sWhat to Read When 2018 is Just Around the Corner, Esquire.com’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 (So Far), Autostraddle’s 65 Feminist & Queer Books to Read in 2018, The Millions’ Most Anticipated: The Great 2018 Book Preview, Vol.1 Brooklyn’s 23 for 2018: A Literary Preview for the Year to Come, Book Riot’s June 2018 Roundup, Mind Body Green’s 5 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down this June, Fast Company’s June Must-Reads, The Coil’s Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2016, Book Trib’s Most Anticipated List of 2018, Philadelphia Magazine’s Biz Leaders Most-Read Books of 2018, the Times Herald Record’s Summer Reading Roundup, Maine Public’s Summer Reads Roundup, Twin Cities Pioneer Press’ Summer Reads Roundup, Texas Book Festival’s Lit Director’s 2018 reads, Bestselling Books Today’s Roundup, Bookish’s Summer’s 2018 Must-Read Nonfiction, The Week’s Most Anticipated Books of 2018, Black Nerd Problems’ Most Anticipated Books of 2018, Poets and Writers’ New and Noteworthy Books, Library Journal’s Celebrity Book Club, WOCreads’ 10 WOC Reads in June 2018, and Lit Celebrasian’s June Books by Asian Authors.

[zenlesszonezero]