Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780525564713)

From the much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a beautifully rendered, poignant collection of personal essays, chronicling immigrant and Iranian-American life in our contemporary moment.

Novelist Porochista Khakpour's family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up their successes only to be greeted by an alienating culture. Growing up as an immigrant in America means that one has to make one's way through a confusing tangle of conflicting cultures and expectations. And Porochista is pulled between the glitzy culture of Tehrangeles, an enclave of wealthy Iranians and Persians in LA, her own family's modest life and culture, and becoming an assimilated American.

Porochista rebels--she bleaches her hair and flees to the East Coast, where she finds her community: other people writing and thinking at the fringes. But, 9/11 happens and with horror, Porochista watches from her apartment window as the towers fall. Extremism and fear of the Middle East rises in the aftermath and then again with the election of Donald Trump. Porochista is forced to finally grapple with what it means to be Middle-Eastern and Iranian, an immigrant, and a refugee in our country today.

Brown Album is a stirring collection of essays, at times humorous and at times profound, drawn from more than a decade of Porochista's work and with new material included. Altogether, it reveals the tolls that immigrant life in this country can take on a person and the joys that life can give.

Author: Porochista Khakpour
ISBN-10: 0525564713
ISBN-13: 9780525564713
Publisher: Vintage
Language: English
Published: 05/19/2020
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.10w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/30/2020
Kirkus Reviews 04/01/2020
Library Journal 05/01/2020 pg. 117
Booklist 05/01/2020 pg. 10