Bookforum talks with Said Sayrafiezadeh

In Said Sayrafiezadeh’s new collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With The Enemy, the author takes on America’s seemingly unending wars and the moral ambivalence that can come from engaging in them, The book comes on the heels of Sayrafiezadeh’s acclaimed debut, When Skateboards Will Be Free, which detailed his upbringing as the son of a Jewish mother and an Iranian father, and the family’s complex relationship to radical politics in the 1970s and 80s.

In Said Sayrafiezadeh’s new collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With The Enemy, the author takes on America’s seemingly unending wars and the moral ambivalence that can come from engaging in them. The book follows Sayrafiezadeh’s acclaimed debut, When Skateboards Will Be Free, which detailed his upbringing as the son of a Jewish mother and an Iranian father, and the family’s complex relationship to radical politics in the 1970s and 80s. Brief Encounters, Sayrafiezadeh’s first book of fiction, reveals his talent for creating the interior worlds of a variety of characters. In an interview

interviews June 24, 2013

Bookforum talks with Karl Ove Knausgaard

"My world isn’t minimalist; my world isn’t perfect, so why on earth should my writing be? I then did the same thing with every other rule. Show, don’t tell? What happens if you do tell, really try to tell EVERYTHING, and don’t give a damn about subtext? Something else happens, something you can’t control. No matter how explicitly you describe a person or a scene, there is always a shadow in the text, a kind of tone or sound, and that tone or sound is the important thing."

In Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s mammoth, six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, the trivial and the momentous mix, change places, and push the work beyond the limits of categorization. At once a Proustian chronicle of the everyday and a latter-day account of a man’s need for, if not a room, then a few hours of his own in which to write, Knausgaard’s work—a controversial sensation in Norway—has been called “the most significant literary enterprise of our time." In a series of generous, thoughtful e-mails—some sent from “a balcony in a hotel in Beirut,” where the writer was