American Estrangement
Stories
3 February 2023
Description
Stories that capture our times by “a young author who has already established himself as a unique American voice” (Elle)
Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Best American Short Stories—is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles—a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction—even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political and racial forces of American society.
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
"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
