Amazon.com: Persian Girls: A Memoir: Nahid Rachlin: Books

http://www.amazon.com/Persian-Girls-M...

From Publishers Weekly This lyrical and disturbing memoir by the author of four novels (Foreigner, etc.) tells the story of an Iranian girl growing up in a culture where, despite the Westernizing reforms of the Shah, women had little power or autonomy. As an infant in 1946, Rachlin was given to her mother's favorite sister, a widow who had been unable to conceive, and was lovingly raised among supportive widows who took refuge in religion from their frustrations as women in an oppressive society. But at the age of nine, Rachlin's father, whom she barely knew, met her at school without warning and brought her to Ahvaz to live with her birth family. Miserable in the new household, young Nahid was befriended by her American movie–obsessed sister Pari. Both sisters developed artistic ambitions, but only Nahid managed to escape the typical female fate, convincing her father to send her to college in the U.S. Less lucky is Pari, whose life of arranged marriage, divorce from an abusive husband and estrangement from her son ends in depression and early death. Exuding the melancholy of an outsider, this memoir gives American readers rare insight into Iranians' ambivalence toward the United States, the desire for American freedom clashing with resentment of American hegemony. (Oct. 5)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.Review Nahid's life plays out against a backdrop of tragedy. She has escaped to America, but she's lost so much of what she loved...the author doesn't comment directly on the meaning of these events. She just tells the tales of individuals crushed. This is just a story of how it was, during a certain period of time, for one upper-middle-class family in Iran, destroyed from within and without by forces it couldn't begin to reckon with. -- Carolyn See, The Washington Post --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. See all Editorial Reviews

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Persian Girls: A Memoir

Nahid Rachlin

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Reading by Nahid Rachlin, from memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin paperback edition just released),
February 15, Friday, 7:00 PM
Bluestockings Bookstore, Manhattan
172 Allen Street (between Stanton and Rivington)
Event is free
Trains: F- 1 block south of the F train's 2nd Avenue stop
Info:(212) 777-6028
Nahid's website: website: http://www.nahidrachlin.com

Description of PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin)
In a story of ambition, oppression, hope, heartache, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin's coming of age in Iran-and her domineering father-her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soul mate, Pari. Both girls refused to accept traditional roles prescribed for them under cultural laws. They devoured forbidden books. They had secret romances. But then things quickly changed. Pari was forced by her parents to marry a wealthy suitor, a cruel man who kept her a prisoner in her own home. After narrowly avoiding an unhappy match herself with a man her parents chose for her, Nahid came to America, where she found literary success. Back in Iran, however, Pari's dreams fell to pieces.

Boston Globe:
"Persian Girls, reads like a novel -- suspenseful, vivid, heartbreaking. In Persian Girls, Rachlin chronicles her choices and those made by her sisters, her mother and her aunts, throwing the door to her family's home wide open. Readers who follow her through will be wiser, and moved."
NPR:
THE WORLD Selected by Christopher Merrill, the Director of Iowa International Writing Program as one of the best four books of 2006. "If you want to know what it was like to grow up in Iran this is the book to read. Her portrait of the artist is filled with light."

BIO: Nahid Rachlin’s publications include the memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin), four novels and a collection of short stories. While a student she held a Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). The grants and awards she have  received include, the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She teaches at the New School University, this semester, starting on January 28.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend