Brown Album

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“Confusing, exhilarating, terrifying, sad, scary, magical…. This book was balm to my Turkish-American soul, and to my cosmopolitan-writer-beyond-nationalism soul. Every page is overflowing with verve and insight and hilarity and brilliance and sadness and historical and cultural specificity. Porochista Khakpour is a treasure.” —Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot ”Porochista Khakpour writes with incandescent gusto! This is an ‘album’ that masterfully makes use of a full array of styles–political analysis, pop and fashion appreciation, and personal essay.  Brown Album  is a vital and beautiful book for these days of ugly xenophobia and paranoia.” —Mona Eltahawy, author of  The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls “The legendary Porochista Khakpour has created a rigorous, poetic and biting exploration of what it means to be brown, Iranian, female and American in a United States that has spent the last few decades putting these identities under siege.” —Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood, Brothers of the Gun with Marwan Hisham

“Splendidly elegant…. A fluid collection of essays that reads like a memoir, it targets—with devastating precision—the internal conflicts, turmoil and sometime agony of being the ‘other’ in an America that has always been, and is perhaps more so today.” —Hooman Majd, author of New York Times bestseller  The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

“Brilliant…. What I love most about Porochista Khakpour’s writing is her voice: always direct, always passionate, always clear and brave, full of compassion and vulnerability, always open to the world. Brown Album is both a manifesto of survival and a lyric journey.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

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 Khakpour spent her formative years ‘trying on and discarding selves’ in a search for belonging.

Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour review – a question of self-discovery

In this compellingly candid set of autobiographical essays, the Iranian American author recalls ‘trying on and discarding selves’

O f the many tens of thousands of Iranians who emigrated to the west after the 1979 revolution, the majority settled in California. Among them were Porochista Khakpour’s parents, who moved to the US with their young daughter in 1981. As employees of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, they had enjoyed a relatively privileged life; in their new incarnation as refugees they lived a more modest existence, inhabiting “a tiny crummy suburban apartment” in a lower middle-class neighbourhood in Pasadena. Khakpour’s father, a nuclear physicist, took a teaching job at a university. “They had deep accents, slim savings, and a resistance to assimilation. Like many, they believed their stay in the United States was temporary.”

New York-based Khakpour is the author of two novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) and The Last Illusion (2014), and a memoir about illness, Sick (2014). Brown Album brings together a number of her autobiographical essays about being an Iranian American in the 21st century, which first appeared in publications such as the New York Times and Salon. They tell a fairly typical first-generation immigrant story of identity confusion and gradual self-discovery. Khakpour spent her formative years “trying on and discarding selves” in a search for belonging, a process she likens to “a child playing dress-up”: “The great thing about extreme artificial and overtly outré personas is you go back to that childhood game and linger in the lovely oddness of transparency.”

“The Iranian people and their government couldn’t be more different,” writes Khakpour, “and neither could the Iranian diaspora of Los Angeles and Iranians in Iran.” This difference is particularly pronounced in the rich Iranian Americans of Brentwood and Beverly Hills, easily identifiable by their blingy attire: “Designer black power suits and leather little somethings, gold chains and giant rocks, stilettos and red lipstick … always topped off by big hair, often a very expensive shade of flaxen.” Khakpour admits a grudging respect for their patron saint, the late fashion designer Bijan Pakzad – he of the notoriously expensive House of Bijan stores – who “beat the Americans at their own game” by building a brand on garish excess. She recalls it was nice, back in the 1990s, to see one of her countrymen being famous for something other than terrorism. The author’s own upbringing was far removed from such glitz and glamour, but her fascination with this milieu – which comprises only a fraction of the 500,000-strong Iranian diaspora in the United States – is understandable given the vicissitudes of her early life. Indeed, while Brown Album ’s primary focus is on racial and religious identity, it is also a case study in déclassé angst. Relegated from the elite by enforced exile, Khakpour bounces back up the social ladder when she gets a scholarship to New York’s prestigious Sarah Lawrence College. Most of the intake there are from more affluent families; her fellow students periodically tease her by remarking that their parents are effectively bankrolling her education.

After the publication of her first novel, Khakpour was inundated with requests from editors inviting her to write about race. Having started off as “a journalist … who wrote about music and art and fashion and books”, she now felt pigeonholed. This problem will be familiar to many ethnic minority writers: if you lack the social networks through which access to opportunities is mediated, writing about identity offers a way in; it’s the path of least resistance, but also something of a trap. There is a difficult conversation to be had about the ethics of the publishing industry with regard to the personal essay, a genre which trades heavily on the trauma of emerging writers – particularly women and minorities – as the price of admission to the fold.

Khakpour writes in the highly subjective style popularised by the New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s and currently much in vogue – an influence acknowledged in the collection’s title, with its nod to Joan Didion’s White Album of 1979. This mode of writing – anecdotal, fragmentary, at times quasi-therapeutic – has its limitations. For a more conventional and scholarly survey of the book’s terrain, readers might prefer The Limits of Whiteness by the sociologist Neda Maghbouleh. But Khakpour’s reminiscences are compellingly candid, and yield some illuminating psychological insights. In one essay, she remembers being cajoled into riding a camel during a family visit to LA Zoo in 1986. Her father thought it would be a fun treat, but the young Khakpour was reluctant: acutely conscious that racist Americans called Middle Easterners “camel jockeys”, she was mortified at the the prospect of conforming to stereotype.

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Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

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Brown album: essays on exile and identity audible audiobook – unabridged.

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.

  • Listening Length 6 hours and 12 minutes
  • Author Porochista Khakpour
  • Narrator Porochista Khakpour
  • Audible release date May 19, 2020
  • Language English
  • Publisher Random House Audio
  • ASIN B085VJFDWD
  • Version Unabridged
  • Program Type Audiobook
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brown album essays on exile and identity

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Brown Album

Essays on Exile and Identity

by Porochista Khakpour

Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour

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Published May 2020 240 pages Genre: Essays Publication Information

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Book summary.

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.

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"In this wonderful essay collection, novelist Khakpour passionately and wittily explores the writing life and the Iranian-American experience...Lovers of the essay and those interested in immigrant literature will be particularly delighted, but any reader can enjoy Khakpour's passionate and enlightening work." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A collection of incisive essays about hyphenated identity...that detonate many notions of identity." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Emotions of sorrow, anger, and anxiety loom large in Khakpour's inner and outer experiences in America, but the humor in her reflections keep this book immune from wallowing. A triumphant entry in the personal essay canon." - Library Journal (starred review) "Confusing, exhilarating, terrifying, sad, scary, magical...This book was balm to my Turkish-American soul, and to my cosmopolitan-writer-beyond-nationalism soul. Every page is overflowing with verve and insight and hilarity and brilliance and sadness and historical and cultural specificity. Porochista Khakpour is a treasure." - Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot "The legendary Porochista Khakpour has created a rigorous, poetic and biting exploration of what it means to be brown, Iranian, female and American in a United States that has spent the last few decades putting these identities under siege." - Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood, Brothers of the Gun with Marwan Hisham "Splendidly elegant...A fluid collection of essays that reads like a memoir, it targets—with devastating precision—the internal conflicts, turmoil and sometime agony of being the 'other' in an America that has always been, and is perhaps more so today." - Hooman Majd, author of New York Times bestseller The Ayatollah Begs to Differ "Brilliant....What I love most about Porochista Khakpour's writing is her voice: always direct, always passionate, always clear and brave, full of compassion and vulnerability, always open to the world. Brown Album is both a manifesto of survival and a lyric journey." - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Author Information

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Porochista Khakpour Author Biography

brown album essays on exile and identity

Photo: Marion Ettlinger

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times "Editor's Choice," Chicago Tribune "Fall's Best," and 2007 California Book Award winner. It also made the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing shortlist, the Dylan Thomas Prize long list, the Believer Book Award longlist, and many others. Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a Kirkus Best Book of 2014, a Buzzfeed Best Fiction Book of 2014, an NPR Best Book of 2014, one of Buzzfeed's 28 Best Books By Women in 2014, an Electric Literature Best Book of 2014, a Volume1 Brooklyn Favorite Book of 2014, a PopMatters Best Book of 2014, one of Refinery29's 2015 Books to Read in ...

... Full Biography Link to Porochista Khakpour's Website

Name Pronunciation Porochista Khakpour: poor-uh-CHISS-tuh KAHK-poor

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Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

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brown album essays on exile and identity

Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

Porochista khakpour. vintage, $16 trade paper (304p) isbn 978-0-525-56471-3.

brown album essays on exile and identity

Reviewed on: 03/11/2020

Genre: Nonfiction

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'brown album' centers on the erasure of race in american culture.

Hope Wabuke

Brown Album

Brown Album

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A few paragraphs into "A New Persian Empire," the prefatory essay of her new collection Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour writes: "Since 9/11, we have been living in a winter of discontent after more than three decades of discontentment."

Those familiar with the American essayistic tradition will no doubt immediately note the titular invitation, made here, to place Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity in conversation with Joan Didion's The White Album . Like Didion's essay collection, Khakpour's newest work is anchored in the personal and the socio-political as she embeds her intellectual investigations within cultural events in California and builds outward to the universal. Khakpour's work, however, is centered in the very telling erasure that has always permeated Didion's work: race in America.

Much of the work of Brown Album is about articulating those stories of brown America that are being simultaneously lived beside, and erased from, mainstream work concerned with equating Americanness with whiteness such as The White Album. Khakpour's work is correction and visibility: about centering the brownness that has been erased from this literary cultural analysis — and accompanying conversations.

There is a refreshing anger, at times, in these pages and rightfully so. Khakpour's anger is directed at erasure, at misogyny and racism, at anti-Muslim and anti-Iranian policies, at healthcare inequalities stemming in large part from environmental racism. "I loved this country," writes Khakpour. "I accepted it and never, until much later, considered that it might not accept me."

Within this anger there is a risk, and an accompanying bravery. The world does not allow anger from women the way it allows anger from men. You are immediately branded "emotional" and "unbalanced," relegated to a stereotype and silenced, your meaning unheard in the policing of the manner of your making that meaning.

This is not to say that there is only one tone in Khakpour's collection of essays. In "The King of Tehrangeles," for example, Khakpour's laconic wit is evident in her looking at the contradiction of how wealthy, light-skinned immigrants of color often cleave to conservative ideologies in America, still fancying themselves members of the elite class back home, not realizing they are no longer the elite here and are working against their own self-interests.

In "Coming of Identity, New York City, Late Nineties," Khakpour, with bitingly cleverness, depicts the classism, microaggressions and loneliness in being one of a handful of P.O.C. at an elite liberal arts school where "My hallmates wore Prada and Gucci and gave me their high school hand-me downs and more than once after a few drinks — amaretto, Chartreuse, Midori? — reminded me, in the wry double-bind delivery of true socialites, that their parents were paying for me to be at school with them."

Throughout the collection, the figure of Los Angeles becomes a palpable breathing character — the Westside riches of Brentwood and Beverly Hills she dubs Tehrangeles with its wealthy Iranians; the "poorer" working-class areas of South Pasadena she grew up in; the racist and heavily segregated Glendale of her parent's retirement; the expectations from her fellow Tehrangelenos that she would be rich because she was Iranian: "'Persian girl, how did this happen to you?' a heavily bejeweled elderly Iranian woman, turning up what must have been her third or fourth nose, once said to me as she spotted me sweeping outside the store," Khakpour writes.

Khakpour is uncomfortable with the incongruence of Iranians at home in Iran, many still feeling the effects of revolution and foreign invasions, contrasted with those at ease in wealth in the SoCal diaspora. Critiquing such representations, popularized by TV shows such as Shahs of Sunset and films like A Separation, she asks : "Who can capture a young diaspora doing as young diasporas do: huffing freedom and crashing and burning, trying on and discarding selves made up of their parents' hand-me-down post-traumatic stress disorder?"

Khakpour's narrative work is strongest when she turns the lens on herself to do the self-critical work of examining how she, too, is complicit; it is less convincing — verging on judgmental — when she turns her critical lens solely on others. Thus, at times, Khakpour's usually sophisticated understanding of race and class appears problematic: There is a lack of interrogation about her own privilege in America — for example, the South Pasadena she calls "working class" in a regret that her family could not fit into the lifestyle of the Iranian elite in LA has actually long been considered a desirable San Gabriel Valley neighborhood.

Additionally, Khakpour here continues the tradition of non-black people of color appropriating blackness as Brown Album itself conveys a lack of interrogation about her own adoption of hip-hop music, AAVE, braids, "passing" for black and co-opting her black boyfriend's experience of blackness; there is also the confusing choice to project onto white people racist comments solely from Khakpour's imagination. After an accident, for example, Khakpour imagines a white nurse yelling a racist expletive at her and telling her to go back to her country. What the nurse had really said was: "How brave of you."

However, many of these previously published essays, written for shorter venues, are just too tantalizingly brief to allow Khakpour space to do the deep analytical work needed here. And this is especially evident in an essay collection whose title lays claim to reckoning with one of the masters of deep and cogent essayistic analysis: Joan Didion.

Missed reflective opportunities are not the only way the Didion allusion is handled rather clumsily — even the collection's long-awaited and only direct references to Didion in the titular last essay are less successful than they could have been because of how the figure of Didion is used. Khakpour writes Didion as a vehicle weaponized by others to showcase discrimination Khakpour deems unfair instead of creating a vibrant conversation with Didion's ideas to fully analyze Didion's problematic racial erasure.

Writes Khakpour: "In winter 2017, I tweeted 'one of the top 100 most exhausting things about white people is their obsession with joan didion.'" However, in both its stereotypical language towards whiteness and its blanket dismissal of a type of intellectual inquiry, this statement was not inclusive to all of the students in Khakpour's low residency MFA classroom at the time, specifically the students who inhabited either of the identity groups dismissed in Khakpour's tweet: whiteness or writing students who valued Didion's contribution to the American literary tradition. Khakpour acknowledges that some of the students were upset by her words, but only as a way of showing the students as another threat to herself. Nowhere in Khakpour's analysis is an understanding of the effect of her words onto her students — of the power dynamic within the classroom between professor and students — and how Khakpour's words hold a different weight when seen in that context. Instead, in Khakpour's retelling, these students again have their voices dismissed and erased, which is the exact critique — erasure — that Khakpour makes of Didion in the first place.

Toward the end of this essay, Khakpour imagines a physical comparison between Didion and herself, leaning into her own frailty (the lyme-disease she details in her memoir Sick ): "Didion, eternally in a summer of '69, smoking away, thin but not from illness like me, hair in perfect golden waves, shaking her head. You don't cross Didion." No one is challenging Khakpour's illness; this is her narration. Instead, an unsaid "or else," lingers after Khakpour's sentence, ascribing to Didion a bullying behavior that Didion never engaged in towards Khakpour. And because it is primarily the body and appearance of Didion that Khakpour focuses on to ridicule, Khakpour's description of Didion can read as one woman tearing another down because of her appearance in a relic of high school "mean girls" behavior.

One wonders if one substituted "black people" for "white people" in Khakpour's tweet, and "James Baldwin" for "joan didion," if Khakpour would think differently about the effect of her words on all students.

One wonders, as well, what the thrilling mind of Khakpour would have done if these essays were double, or even triple, their length and allowed to consistently revel in the reflective work that, when done, is razor-sharp and acute.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

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brown album essays on exile and identity

  • Book Reviews

Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

Written by Porochista Khakpour

Reviewed by Anjali Mehta

In a deeply raw, emotional, and sentimental coming of age story, Porochista Khakpour dives into an exploration of her heritage, culture, and identity. Brown Album is far more than a collection of essays, it is a collection of memories showcasing self-discovery as a first-generation immigrant from Iran as well as shining a light on the Iranian-American experience.

This book, due to its personal and specific content, may be relatively more relatable to an audience with a similar background to Khakpour, but on a larger scale, the issues and personal anecdotes from Brown Album offer something for anybody who chooses to read it.

Ultimately a personal reflection of self-discovery, the essence of the book lies in embracing racial identity. Khakpour invites the reader to join her through her journey of finding herself in an eye-opening, honest, sometimes humorous set of essays.

Race being the central aspect of both Khakpour’s persona and the book prompt anecdotes throughout the book of her various struggles to accept her racial identity. She confronts stereotypes and inner conflicts to portray her identity crisis caused by her cultural heritage of being born in Iran. With this she depicts the life of a typical first-generation immigrant child stuck between two identities forced to come to terms with her birth country, Iran, and being brown in America. It is a passionate tale about a racial identity crisis both personally and politically.

Khakpour provides personal accounts of how her family moved to Los Angeles in 1981 due to the Iranian Revolution as refugees and then the trials of being the only Iranian student in her elementary, middle, and high school as well as the tribulations of writing her first novel and then being known as not just an “Iranian-American writer” but, a “9/11 author.” Due to the theme of race, politics inevitably weaved its way to her memoirs when she shared her very real and candor fear about the rumors of the Trump presidency deporting even naturalized citizens such as her family and herself. She felt in the spotlight of racist comments and the heat of toxicity echoing from others as an Iranian immigrant.

Throughout the book, Khakpour returns to the ideas of personal and political struggles with race to illuminate her struggle to find herself. She documents her cultural exploration of White America as a Brown individual an Iranian Immigrant.

Like many immigrant families, Khakpour’s family presumed their stay in the United States to be temporary. However, her family stayed and with that began her struggle to confront her racial identity; her “Persia,” as she called Iran, and Iran the four-letter word which carries within its spaces stereotypes and negative connotations. This is showcased in a series of actions, from feeling conscientious about riding a camel at the zoo due to her perceived cultural stereotypes to dying her hair blonde. Her anger and struggles with her race start at the beginning when she notices the heavy baggage carried with the word “Iran.” She is left between two identities, unable to confront either.

Khakpour explores microaggressions and classism in “Coming of Identity, New York City, Late Nineties,” where she describes her experience being one of only a few people of color at Sarah Lawrence, an elite liberal arts school (Khakpour, p. 54). Her classmates who paraded in expensive clothes “more than once after a few drinks … reminded me, in the wry double-bind delivery of true socialites, that their parents were paying for me to be at school with them” (Khakpour, p.58). She experienced, first-hand, acts of prejudice, which only built her anger. This anger comes back when she sees a woman wearing a Burka in Brooklyn being pointed out by a group of teenagers. When Donald Trump rose to power her protective range returns and with that, she begins to accept her Muslim identity.

Brown Album is certainly a profound personal journey of self-discovery but at the same time, it is a commentary also on socio-political issues, as seen in the above examples. Her internal conflict with race was not, however, limited to that between “Americans” and POCs; she also saw it within her own LA community of Iranians. When discussing the “King of Tehrangeles,” or Bijan, an eclectic, Iranian fashion designer, Khakpour comments on the wealthy Iranian immigrants who begin to share the ideologies of Americans and consider themselves members of the elite class (Khakpour, p. 84). She compares them to her family whom she describes as “working class.” But when confronted face-to-face with a member of the Tehrangeles, and the expectations that she would be rich because she was Iranian: “‘Persian girl, how did this happen to you?’ Persian girl, how did this happen to you? a heavily bejeweled elderly Iranian woman,’ turning up what must have been her third or fourth nose, once said to me as she spotted me sweeping outside the store,” Khakpour writes, it makes her uncomfortable (Khakpour, p. 85). And years later when asked about a Bijan advertisement on a truck, Khakpour takes a step toward confronting her identity and exclaims that she hates Bijan. She also brings attention to popular television programs such as Shahs of Sunset and films like A Separation in their representation of Iranians and their culture making her uncomfortable (Khakpour, p. 4).

But this doesn’t end here, Khakpour herself notices how even she has certain prejudices, for instance when Khakpour believes a white nurse telling her to go back to her country. In actuality, what the nurse had said was, “how brave of you” (Khakpour, p.44).

Khakpour battles with confronting her racial identity and chronicles her experience of Brown America, she says: “I loved this country,” writes Khakpour. “I accepted it and never, until much later, considered that it might not accept me.”

Brown Album is a personal struggle with racial identity; it is about coming to terms with Iranian heritage and being Brown in America. And in her own words “are a testament to the greatest and worst experiences of my life,” and that much of this book was written in tears” (Khakpour, p.1).

It is about inner conflict and the struggle to find and then accept oneself. At a time like this, Brown Album provides a wonderfully written yet harsh reality on race and an urge for solidarity.

Porochista Khakpour is an author and teacher of creative writing. She has authored countless publications which have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Time, Slate, CNN, Elle, and more, as well as books such as Sick (2018), The Last Illusion (2014), and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007). Sick (2018) was designated the “Most Anticipated Book of 2018,” by countless magazines and journals including HuffPost, Bustle, and The Rumpus where are The Last Illusion (2014), was called the 2014 “Best Book of the Year” by NPR and Kirkus Reviews. She has also taught creative writing and literature at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Wesleyan College, and more. Currently, she is guest faculty at VCFA and Stonecoast’s MFA programs as well as Contributing Editor at The Evergreen Review and The Offing.

brown album essays on exile and identity

Anjali Mehta is a junior at New York University studying applied psychology and philosophy. After she graduates, she intends to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology to eventually practice as a psychotherapist. At NYU, she works with the Mindful Education Lab and is currently investigating the overlap between cognitive neuropsychology and meditation, specifically by researching attention and technology. She is also a certified advanced yoga instructor and MBSR coach.

Khakpour, P. (2020). Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. New York, New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-525-56471-3. Available in paperback and eBook. Paperback, 304. Includes Index.

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Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Paperback)

Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity By Porochista Khakpour Cover Image

Description

About the author, praise for….

  • Literary Collections / Essays
  • Literary Criticism / Middle Eastern
  • Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
  • Kobo eBook (May 18th, 2020): $12.99

IMAGES

  1. Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin

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  2. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour

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  3. Perspectives on Identity and Exile: Edward Said

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  4. Exile and identity: How does exile impact writers?

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  5. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour

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  6. Brown Album: Essays on exile and identity by Porochista Khakpour review

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COMMENTS

  1. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    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 ...

  2. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    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. Read more. Print length. 221 pages. Language. English.

  3. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    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. ... The Essays on Exile and Identity included in ...

  4. Brown Album : Essays on Exile and Identity

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. Brown Album. : Porochista Khakpour. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, May 19, 2020 - Literary Collections - 240 pages. 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.

  5. Brown Album

    Essays on Exile and Identity. download image Available at. Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble. Indie Bound. ... 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 ...

  6. Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour review

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity is published by Vintage. Explore more on these topics. Essays; Autobiography and memoir; reviews; Share. Reuse this content. Most viewed. Most viewed. Film;

  7. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity|Paperback

    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. Product Details.

  8. Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour: 9780525564713

    Brown Album, which compiles more than 10 years of Khakpour's work, analyzes her identities as both an Iranian-American and as a writer. The pieces range in subject, from the process of writing a novel to the aftermath of President Trump's election, but all provide fresh insight into one woman's experience as an immigrant in the U.S.".

  9. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity Audible Audiobook - Unabridged . Porochista Khakpour (Author, Narrator), Random House Audio (Publisher) 4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 56 ratings. ... 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 ...

  10. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Paperback)

    Brown Album, which compiles more than 10 years of Khakpour's work, analyzes her identities as both an Iranian-American and as a writer. The pieces range in subject, from the process of writing a novel to the aftermath of President Trump's election, but all provide fresh insight into one woman's experience as an immigrant in the U.S."

  11. Brown Album: Essays on exile and identity by Porochista Khakpour ...

    Paperback, $16. Brown Album is the book the novelist and essayist Porochista Khakpour never wanted to write. Khakpour - born in Tehran, raised in Greater Los Angeles, now a self-proclaimed New Yorker - describes it as testament to "the greatest and worst experience of my life: being a spokesperson for my people".

  12. Summary and reviews of Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour

    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. Membership Advantages.

  13. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Paperback)

    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.

  14. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. Porochista Khakpour. Buy Now. Indiebound. Publisher. Vintage. Date. May 19, 2020. Essays Non-Fiction. From the much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a collection of personal essays, chronicling immigrant and Iranian-American life in our contemporary moment. ...

  15. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity Porochista Khakpour. Vintage, $16 trade paper (304p) ISBN 978--525-56471-3

  16. Being brown in America: Stories of exile, identity and belonging

    Named after Joan Didion's 1979 book The White Album, which chronicled the decline of American identity in the 1960s, Brown Album collects essays published over a period of years in which ...

  17. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    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.<br /> <br /> 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 ...

  18. 'Brown Album' Centers On The Erasure Of Race In American Culture

    A few paragraphs into "A New Persian Empire," the prefatory essay of her new collection Brown Album, ... to place Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity in conversation with Joan Didion's The ...

  19. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. Written by Porochista Khakpour. Reviewed by Anjali Mehta. In a deeply raw, emotional, and sentimental coming of age story, Porochista Khakpour dives into an exploration of her heritage, culture, and identity. Brown Album is far more than a collection of essays, it is a collection of memories showcasing ...

  20. Porochista Khakpour's 'Brown Album' confronts a troubling duality

    Porochista Khakpour's "Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity" is a collection of essays republished into a singular meditation on the Tehran-born and L.A.-raised author's journey within the Iranian American diaspora. The book is out May 19. Porochista Khakpour was not trying to be a spokesperson for the Iranian American diaspora.

  21. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Paperback)

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Paperback) By Porochista Khakpour. $16.00 ... 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 ...

  22. Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour

    Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour (2020). Published by Vintage. I will admit, I picked up this book with a specific intention. As an Iranian-American woman myself, I knew of Porochista Khakpour's work and how she was, essentially, one of the first women in the diaspora to really kick off a career as a writer.

  23. Brown album: essays on exile and identity

    "Brown Album is a stirring collection of essays, at times humorous and at times profound, drawn from more than a decade of Khakpour's work. Altogether, it reveals the tolls that immigrant life in this country can take on a person and the joys that life can give."--Provided by publisher.