American Estrangement

Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories — some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories — are set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to fans of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. 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 are battered by the larger, often invisible, economic and political forces of American society. Searing, intimate, often slyly funny, and always marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement is a testament to our addled times. It will cement Sayrafiezadeh's reputation as one of the essential twenty-first-century American writers.