Sons and Other Flammable Objects
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
Powell's Books
Synopsis:
A wry and haunting first novel from a fresh Iranian-American writer, Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a sweeping, lyrical tale of suffering, redemption, and the role of memory and inheritance in making peace with our worlds. Growing up, Xerxes Adam is painfully aware that he is different—with an understanding of his Iranian heritage that vacillates from typical teenage embarrassment to something so tragic it can barely be spoken. His father, Darius, dwells obsessively on his sense of exile, and fantasizes about a nonexistent daughter he can relate to better than his living son; Xerxes’s mother changes her name and tries to make friends; but neither of them offers their son anything he can actually use to make sense of the terrifying, violent last moments in a homeland he barely remembers. As he grows into manhood and moves to New York, his major goal in life is to completely separate from his parents, but when he meets a beautiful half-Iranian girl on the roof of his building after New York’s own terrifying and violent catastrophe strikes, it seems Iran will not let Xerxes go.
Book Excerpt:
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
Topics/Categories:
9/11, Fathers and Sons, Iranian-Americans, Iranians, Los Angeles, Middle East, New York
Genre:
American Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Middle Eastern Fiction, Postmodernism
Type of Work:
Publishers:
Awards:
2008) California Book Award (First Fiction award
Purchase From:
Original Publish Date:
September 25, 2007
Formats and associated ISBNs:
0802118534 978-0802118530
Formats:
Hardcover
- Share With:
