American Estrangement
Stories
10 August 2021
Description
Stories that capture our times by “a young author who has already established himself as a unique American voice” (Elle).
Searing, intimate, often slyly funny, and always marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement is a testament to our addled times. It will cement Sayrafiezadeh’s reputation as one of the essential twenty-first-century American writers.
Reviews
"[An] excellent new collection…[Sayrafiezadeh] writes with a veteran’s swagger and discipline…[T]he collection joins a list that includes Leonard Michaels’s “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could,” Lorrie Moore’s “Like Life” and Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Dead Fish Museum” as a second book of stories that exceeds and expands upon the promise of the first, confirming the writer as a major, committed practitioner of a difficult form." — Andrew Martin, The New York Times Book Review
"Despite its array of different settings, American Estrangement is thematically and formally cohesive. In addition to its treatment of disconnection and precarity, there is a compelling combination of realism and allegory, and some dystopian flourishes – features that have inspired comparisons with the work of George Saunders." — Arin Keeble, The Times Literary Supplement
"A dark and exhilarating collection." — David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
"Skillful and controlled…[The stories in American Estrangement] speak, at times quite powerfully, to an overriding feeling of cultural and personal loneliness." — Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"[A] stellar new collection… Sayrafiezadeh is a master… His prose has a rhythm that is startlingly original and an intense quirkiness that catches you unaware." — Elaine Margolin, Los Angeles Review of Books
Awards
Shortlisted — Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2021
Longlisted — Story Prize, 2021
