Dear Eric,
I would certainly want to seriously consider inviting her next academic year. She sounds fascinating, and the people who endorse her work are very impressive to me.
David
________________________________________
From: Miami University Creative Writing Faculty [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Schloss, David Mr. [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 5:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: INQUIRING about giving a talk/reading from my memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS-Nahid Rachlin
Thanks, Eric
________________________________________
From: Miami University Creative Writing Faculty [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Goodman, Eric [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 4:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FW: INQUIRING about giving a talk/reading from my memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS-Nahid Rachlin
Fyi
I've already written to say that I think we're pretty much full up for this
year.......
Eric
------ Forwarded Message
From: Nahid Rachlin <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:52:27 -0400
To: "Goodman, Eric" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: INQUIRING about giving a talk/reading from my memoir, PERSIAN
GIRLS-Nahid Rachlin
Dear Professor Goodman, I am writing to find out if you would be interested
in inviting me to give a talk-reading from my memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS or from
my fiction in your program when you have an opening. I attended Columbia
University MFA program on a Double-Columbia Fellowship and then went to
Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. My publication include,
several novels, among them, FOREIGNER (Norton), and a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS
(Penguin.) One of my short stories was produced by Symphony Space, as part
of their "Selected Shorts," series, and was aired on NPRs, "selected
shorts" around the country. I have also been granted a Pen Syndicated
project award and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. **There is a
long interview with me in the May/summer 2008 issue of AWP Writers
Chronicle. For more please click on my website: http://www.nahidrachlin.com
(212) 9963478
***
Excerpts from Reviews:
About PERSIAN GIRLS:
National Public Radio: The World
Christopher Merrill, the Director of Iowa International Writing Program: "If
you want to know what it was like to grow up in Iran this is the book to
read. The prospects of her becoming a writer were, at best, dim. But her
portrait of the artist in an Islamic country on the verge of dramatic change
is filled with light."
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... 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."
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."
The Charlotte Observer:
"Iran again looms large on the world stage. Rhetoric conjures fear of
radical Islam and flashbacks to the Ayatollah Khomeini-- images that obscure
Iran's rich cultural history as Persia and ignore ordinary people torn
between old and new, secular and sacred. In her bittersweet memoir, Persian
Girls, Iranian American novelist Nahid Rachlin fills in the blanks."
About JUMPING OVER FIRE:
"If, as Aristotle reminds us, we are our desire, then who are we if the
object of our desire is forbidden? What becomes of us if we are born in one
world yet long for another? These are just two of the complex and difficult
questions Nahid Rachlin explores and ultimately illuminates in this brave,
engrossing, and timely novel. I recommend it highly!"
--Andre (Dubus III),author of House of Sand and Fog, and In the Bedroom
łThis poignant, beautifully told story of an Iranian-American family is both
a great read and a fine introduction to a land and a culture about which it
is imperative we Americans inform ourselves as much and as quickly as
possible.˛
‹ Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and For Rouenna.
About FOREIGNER:
New York Times Book Review:
"... a rare intimate look at Iranians who are poorer and less educated... I
have read (this book) four times by now, and each time I have discovered
new layers in it. The voice is cool and pure. Bleak is the right word, if
you will understand that bleakness can have a startling beauty."
-- Anne Tyler, NY Times Book Review
"... an accomplished Iranian novel... FOREIGNER avoids political comment.
Its protest is more oblique, the political constriction drives the passion
deeper, and the novel with all its air of innocence, is a novel of
violation, helplessness and defeat."
-- V.S. Naipaul, from Among the Believers
About MARRIED TO A STRANGER:
New York Times Book Review:
"The ecstasies and disillusionments of first love are the stuff of great
tragedies and cheap romances but Nahid Rachlin has done something else with
this familiar theme, and something more, though her style is elegantly
simple... Miss Rachlin shows us not only the tranquil inner courtyards with
sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal
chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending
for primacy in the streets outside... Minou is a dreamy literary girl...
like other yearning heroines from Dorothea Brooke to Emma Bovary, she wants
more than conventional marriage..."-- New York Times book Review
"MARRIED TO A STRANGER seems to me such a clear statement and all of one
pieces-- a direct cry, as it were, from out of a particular feminine
sensibility. Reading the book, one feels one knows what it is like to be a
girl growing up to be a woman in urban, 'modern' Iran; and knows it not from
the outside, as from a sociological survey, but from within a living
experience... Nahid Rachlin has refined her prose... by giving it the
clarity and spare sensuousness of Persian poetry or miniature painting."
-- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
About VEILS:
"... The commonalities of life, wherever it's lived, shine through in these
tales of family friendship, love, and war... They are stories of strength
and endurance that continually remind us how fragile our outer shells can
be, how deeply love can be felt, and how strong the influence of home is,
wherever home may be."
-- 500 Great Books by Women, A Reader's Guide, Penguin Books
About THE HEART'S DESIRE:
"What is remarkable about THE HEART'S DESIRE is its even-handedness and
painful honesty. Rachlin's characters face each other across a gulf of
irreconcilable differences, but she shows them to us with their complexity
and dignity intact, their deepest needs as recognizable to our own. In the
end, though, Iran is the major character in this novel. By the time we've
finished confronting it from very diverse perspectives, each beautifully
evoked, we have experienced the potent spell it casts over its people, and
the weight of that spell fora Western woman." -- Rosellen Brown
"Nahid Rachlin has written an intimate family study that is, simultaneously,
an exploration of cultures, nations, worlds. Her willingness to be
vulnerable to such powerful feeling, and her ability to pass it along to us,
make THE HEART'S DESIRE a profoundly moving experience."
-- Frederick Busch
-- Kirkus Reviews:
"... offers an affecting portrait of the irreconcilable conflict between the
familiar and the foreign... A perceptive account, in polished prose..."
-- Kirkus Review
------ End of Forwarded Message
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