Thank you to my students, past and present, always my community and often my friends. Thank you for being my motivation to practice what I preach. Thank you for your openness and enthusiasm. I feel lucky to have crossed paths with so many good citizens of our future.
Thank you to my canine companions during this time: Apollo and Bakiri (RIP), beloved old salukis, and now Cosmo the poodle. How people write without dogs is a mystery to me.
Thank you to writing residencies, where this was mostly penned: VCCA, Yaddo, and most of all, Ucross, two stints under the thrilling open skies of the Wyoming countryside, where I began and ended the writing of the novel.
Thank you to Bucknell University, the College of Santa Fe, Fairfield University’s low-res MFA, the University of Leipzig, Columbia University, Wesleyan University, Fordham University, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University for employing me during this time.
Thank you to the Asian American Writers Workshop, PEN, Guernica, and Canteen families for their support and recognition.
Thank you to Simon Prosser at the UK’s Hamish Hamilton for being the first to believe in this book, whose words gave me courage for quite a long time.
Thank you to New York Times op ed editors David Shipley and Mark Lotto for giving me a new voice and allowing me the opportunity of a lifetime, the gift of column inches over and over. Thank you for believing I was worthy of an audience.
Thank you to the NEA for championing this book and making it possible with their generous grant.
Thank you to Dick Davis for his intelligent translation of the Shahnameh, which allowed me to fill the too-many holes of my rusty Persian.
Thank you to Ali Banisadr — one of our greatest living painters and my dear friend — who shares my dreams and nightmares, my history and blood. I can never thank you enough for so allowing us to use your glorious masterpiece “Fravashi” for the cover.
Thank you to haters and lovers alike whose pushes and pulls, equal and opposite energies, only got me towards the bigger and better.
Thank you most of all to my father, Asha Khakpour, for reading me stories from the Shahnameh for all of my childhood. And to him and Manijeh Khakpour, my mother, for tolerating more eccentricity, antics, hijinks, and nonstop mayhem than any creators should.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in the greater Los Angeles area. She has been awarded fellowships from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Yaddo. She is most recently the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose). Her debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in First Fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, the Village Voice, the Chicago Reader, Spin, the Paris Review Daily, Granta.com, Slate, Salon, and many other magazines and newspapers around the world. Khakpour has taught creative writing and literature at Johns Hopkins University, Hofstra University, Bucknell University, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Fairfield University’s MFA program, and the University of Leipzig (where she was a Picador Guest Professor). She currently teaches at Columbia University’s MFA program, Fordham University, and Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.