Brown Album Audiobook By Porochista Khakpour cover art

Brown Album

Essays on Exile and Identity

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Brown Album

By: Porochista Khakpour
Narrated by: Porochista Khakpour
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About this listen

From the much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a beautifully rendered, poignant collection of personal essays, chronicling immigrant and Iranian-American life in our contemporary moment.

Novelist Porochista Khakpour's family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up their successes only to be greeted by an alienating culture. Growing up as an immigrant in America means that one has to make one's way through a confusing tangle of conflicting cultures and expectations. And Porochista is pulled between the glitzy culture of Tehrangeles, an enclave of wealthy Iranians and Persians in LA, her own family's modest life and culture, and becoming an assimilated American. Porochista rebels - she bleaches her hair and flees to the East Coast, where she finds her community: other people writing and thinking at the fringes. But, 9/11 happens and with horror, Porochista watches from her apartment window as the towers fall. Extremism and fear of the Middle East rises in the aftermath and then again with the election of Donald Trump. Porochista is forced to finally grapple with what it means to be Middle-Eastern and Iranian, an immigrant, and a refugee in our country today.

Brown Album is a stirring collection of essays, at times humorous and at times profound, drawn from more than a decade of Porochista's work and with new material included. Altogether, it reveals the tolls that immigrant life in this country can take on a person and the joys that life can give.

©2020 Porochista Khakpour (P)2020 Random House Audio
Biographies & Memoirs Essays Literary History & Criticism Middle Eastern Social Sciences Nonfiction
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Critic reviews

“In this stirring collection of essays, Khakpour explores her life as a writer and her American experience as an Iranian immigrant, touching on the personal and the political with equal grace.”—USA Today

“A moving collection of personal essays centering the Iranian American and immigrant experience today.”Ms. Magazine, May 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us

“Spanning more than a decade, the Iranian-American novelist and memoirist reflects on assimilation and the burdens of being Middle Eastern in today’s America.”—The New York Times Book Review

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Heavy biting critique, that works until it doesn't

If you were to sit down and play or read this in one sitting you may find it very difficult to do so without feeling you are listening to complaints for 6 hours. I think if you break it up it essays and you read a couple hear and there you will enjoy the book, because its not all complaints but if you run through it in one sitting it kinda takes a toll and it feels repetitive.

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