Tuesday, February 10, 7 PM: Visiting Assistant Professsor Porochista Khakpour will give a fiction reading at Bucknell Hall on the campus of Bucknell University.Born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles, Khakpour is the author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic). The debut novel received much acclaim in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. Her writing has appeared widely in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. Khakpour received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA from The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
This event is free and open to the public.
from Sons and Other Flammable Objects:
"None of it was news to him, that these bad things happen—that’s not the part that got him at all. After all, it first occurred to him on one of the days of his early childhood, when America was still new for them all—at one of the moments when he had spied his mother sobbing in the kitchen to no one but a running sink, while on TV Lucy bawled into Ethel’s armpit to the laughter of some invisible audience—that the new world, while a very demanding place for all of its inhabitants, held a functional almost laughable misery for its own and a possibly unconquerable one for the others. Here, the older your world, Xerxes-the-child contemplated, trying to make some rules out of it all, rules that even Xerxes-the-adult could not fully argue with, the sadder and badder your days."
"None of it was news to him, that these bad things happen—that’s not the part that got him at all. After all, it first occurred to him on one of the days of his early childhood, when America was still new for them all—at one of the moments when he had spied his mother sobbing in the kitchen to no one but a running sink, while on TV Lucy bawled into Ethel’s armpit to the laughter of some invisible audience—that the new world, while a very demanding place for all of its inhabitants, held a functional almost laughable misery for its own and a possibly unconquerable one for the others. Here, the older your world, Xerxes-the-child contemplated, trying to make some rules out of it all, rules that even Xerxes-the-adult could not fully argue with, the sadder and badder your days."
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