American Estrangement — Said Sayrafiezadeh

Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction

Longlisted for the 2022 Story Prize

A New York Times Editors' Choice pick

One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021


Stories that capture our times by “a young author who has already established himself as a unique American voice” (Elle).

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 -- is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers 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 larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial 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.