Foreigner

About FOREIGNER:

"I am so impressed with Nahid Rachlin’s style--its purity and sparseness and immediacy. In remarkable few words, she has managed to bring to life an entire small pocket of existence… a rare intimate look at Iranians who are poorer and less educated... I have read (this book) four times by now, and each time I have discovered new layers in it. The voice is cool and pure. Bleak is the right word, if you will understand that bleakness can have a startling beauty."
-- Anne Tyler, NY Times Book Review

"... an accomplished Iranian novel... FOREIGNER avoids political comment. Its protest is more oblique, the political constriction drives the passion deeper, and the novel with all its air of innocence, is a novel of violation, helplessness and defeat."
-- V.S. Naipaul, from Among the Believers

“Foreigner is as spare as Camus’ The Stranger and with some of its enigmatic force. Nahid Rachlin conveys brilliantly an experience of estrangement, alienation on returning to the place of her childhood.”
--Professor Albert Guerard, Stanford University

SHORT STORY
MEMOIR
REVIEW: NPR: The World, selected as ONE OF THE BEST FOUR BOOKS OF the year, by Christopher Merrill, Director of Iowa International Writing program: "If you want to know what it was like to grow up in Iran this is the book to read. Rachlin, the author of five previous works of fiction, including the much acclaimed Foreigner, begins her story at the age of nine, when she was taken away from the only mother she had ever known—her aunt, as it happens—and returned to a family in which the prospects of her becoming a writer were, at best, dim. But her portrait of the artist in an Islamic country on the verge of dramatic change is filled with light."
NOVELS
"If, as Aristotle reminds us, we are our desire, then who are we if the object of our desire is forbidden? What becomes of us if we are born in one world yet long for another? These are just two of the complex and difficult questions Nahid Rachlin explores and ultimately illuminates in this brave, engrossing, and timely novel. I recommend it highly!"--Andre (Dubus III),author of House of Sand and Fog, and In the Bedroom
"... a rare intimate look at Iranians who are poorer and less educated... I have read (this book) four times by now, and each time I have discovered new layers in it. The voice is cool and pure. Bleak is the right word, if you will understand that bleakness can have a startling beauty."
--Anne Tyler, New York Times Book Review
SHORT STORIES

Interviewed by Jessica Blau, author of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

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