In Conversation: On American Estrangement: Stories

Ariel Gonzalez, writer and professor of English and communications at Miami Dade College.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Pittsburgh. He is the author of a memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, and a story collection, Brief Encounters with the Enemy. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and McSweeney’s. American Estrangement: Stories (W. W. Norton & Company), his new collection of short works, some of which have been published previously, is set in a contemporary America full of emotionally bruised characters. These are people contending with internal struggles – a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction – even as they deal with the larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial forces of American society. Kirkus called it “lyrical, funny, smart, and heartbreaking.”