Scan barcode
A review by colemanwarnerwriter
American Estrangement: Stories by Said Sayrafiezadeh
4.0
I've been obsessed with "A, S, D, F" ever since I stumbled upon it in The New Yorker. To this day it is one of my favorite short stories and I knew I had to pick up this collection sooner or later. These stories are witty and subtly strange (for a couple of the stories their strangeness obscured what I was supposed to take away from it). Sayrafiezadeh does not bother easing you into his weird, little, realistic worlds, but he does deliver a familiar tone of cautious optimism despite what occurs throughout these stories.
"Basically, what the doctor is suggesting is that you shouldn't be wasting your time with make-believe stories about boys being pursued through abandoned hotels by men wielding mallets -speaking of metaphor. What you really need to be doing is 'coming to terms,' and you need to be doing it now. You have to start figuring out how the obsolete past is interfering with the inescapable present, ten, fifteen, twenty years later, particularly how it's interfering with your attempt at happiness. But the main impediment, as far as the doctor's concerned, is that you don't know how to figure any of this out, and the other impediment is that you don't know if you want to."
"Basically, what the doctor is suggesting is that you shouldn't be wasting your time with make-believe stories about boys being pursued through abandoned hotels by men wielding mallets -speaking of metaphor. What you really need to be doing is 'coming to terms,' and you need to be doing it now. You have to start figuring out how the obsolete past is interfering with the inescapable present, ten, fifteen, twenty years later, particularly how it's interfering with your attempt at happiness. But the main impediment, as far as the doctor's concerned, is that you don't know how to figure any of this out, and the other impediment is that you don't know if you want to."