Review Excerpt:

“All of Khakpour's strengths are on display here: punchy conversation, vivid detail, sharp humor . . Khakpour brings her characters vividly to life; their flaws and feints at intimacy feel poignantly real, and their journeys generate real suspense. . .they are also imbued with a genuine humanity that wins our affection.
—The New York Times Book Review

“Khakpour explores ethnicity, nationalism, and post-9/11 fear—well-worn themes that are far less compelling than the exuberant originality of her style. The characters burst from the page in fiery exchanges, while their chaotic inner lives are conveyed with witty precision . . . Khakpour’s comic sense of familial tensions—particularly father-son enmity—is infectious.”
—The New Yorker

“Khakpour brings a fresh perspective and style to the genre.”
—The Chicago Tribune

“[A] luminously intelligent debut . . . Khakpour is an elegant writer, and she imparts a perfect sense of the ironies of being Persian in America.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Khakpour displays a barbed, appealing sensibility and a trenchant wit.”
– Kirkus Reviews

"Poignant and amusing . . . shows ways that odd pieces of the past govern our present lives more than we would like."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"Porochista Khakpour's debut novel signals the arrival of a dazzling stylist. Sons and Other Flammable Objects trumps fashionable memoirs of Iran with a jazzy fictional narrative."
-The Daily Star

"Reading [Khakpour's] work is like going joyriding down a rocky mountainside. She splits words open and looks for their multiplicity of meanings. She translates words and customs from the Farsi with both eerie and hilarious effects. It’s thrilling and demanding work, but Khakpour makes it all worth it"
-Sycamore Review

“Hypnotic, kaleidoscopic, gorgeous and mad, this novel is a brilliant and astonishing debut. And the story it tells is the best kind of story—where comedy and tragedy weave together mysteriously and yet organically, like a shifting in the play of light, like life itself.”
—Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and I Love You More Than You Know

“Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a marvelous novel: witty, wise, continually surprising, continually inventive, exuberant, heartbreaking. It resists the easy categories of immigrant lit, family saga, first novel—because it is, first and foremost, a delightful, generous work of literary art.”
—Alice McDermott, author of Charming Billy

"Khakpour's tale is lyrical and wise and funny, in a way that sometimes reminded me of the terrific British novelist Zadie Smith."
-Kurt Andersen, Studio 360 (NPR)

"What a book! By turns comic and tragic, wry and heartfelt, Sons and Other Flammable Objects deftly weaves the history of a single family into the history of an entire people, creating something startling and entirely new. Porochista Khakpour has my complete admiration."
-Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End