"A rare, intimate look at Iranians. . . . I have read [this book] four times by now, and each time I have discovered new layers in it." —Anne Tyler, New York Times Book Review
"Nahid Rachlin has an intimate insider's knowledge of present-day everyday Iran — of people and places, houses, streets, and families — and she writes of them with a clarity of perception and style that makes them instantly recognizable and even homely and familiar to the reader." — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala "Rachlin's prose carefully understates and suggests her heroine's awakening to a pervasive atmosphere of menace and sensuality; residue of a culture she thinks she has abandoned, but which continues to claim her." — Bruce Allen, Chicago Tribune "Foreigner gently raises new as well as timeless questions about an unhappy woman's faith and freedom." — The New Yorker "Conveys the texture of extended family, the stress of modernization, the strain of Moslem rigidity as well as the harmony of nature, of dust and carpets, fruits, sweets, tea, fine rice and gossip. Always gossip." — Eden Lipson, "Special Edition," WNET/Thirteen
BRIEF BIO http://www.nahidrachlin.com
Nahid Rachlin attended Columbia University MFA program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship and then went on to Stanford University MFA program on a Stegner Fellowship. Her publications include a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin), four novels, JUMPING OVER FIRE (City Lights), FOREIGNER (W.W. Norton), MARRIED TO A STRANGER (E.P.Dutton), THE HEART'S DESIRE (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, VEILS (City Lights). Her individual stories have appeared in about fifty magazines. One of her stories was produced by Symphony Space, "Selected Shorts" and was aired on NPR radio stations around the country.
Her work has received favorable reviews in major magazines and newspapers and translated into Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, and Farsi. She has written reviews and essays for New York Times, Newsday, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. She received many awards, including the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
She has been interviewed in magazines such as Poets & Writers and AWP Writers Chronicle, and TV such as Channel 13, and on NPR's such as Fresh Air, Terry Gross, All Things Considered.
Read a recent review of PERSIAN GIRLS: http://www.brooklyntoday.info/features/465-persian-girls.html
