Praise for American Estrangement...

“[Sayrafiezadeh] writes with a veteran’s swagger and discipline....the collection joins a list that includes Leonard Michaels’s “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could,” Lorrie Moore’s “Like Life” and Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Dead Fish Museum” as a second book of stories that exceeds and expands upon the promise of the first, confirming the writer as a major, committed practitioner of a difficult form.”
—The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice

“A dark and exhilarating collection."
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Stellar…Sayrafiezadeh is a master.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Despite its array of different settings, American Estrangement is thematically and formally cohesive. In addition to its treatment of disconnection and precarity, there is a compelling combination of realism and allegory, and some dystopian flourishes – features that have inspired comparisons with the work of George Saunders.” 
— Arin Keeble, The Times Literary Supplement

“Another arresting collection of stories....expertly wrought tales....[American Estrangement] consolidates [Sayrafiezadeh’s] reputation as a skilled writer with a talent for creating flawed and beleaguered characters and plumbing their emotional depths.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Lyrical, funny, smart, and heartbreaking.”
—Kirkus, Starred Review, Best Short Fiction of 2021

“Sayrafiezadeh’s rich collection features poignant stories of characters reflecting on their parents and navigating mismatched jobs.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“The consummate outsider, Sayrafiezadeh examines our nation’s sins with a particularly clear eye, and his latest collection of short stories, American Estrangement, is no exception.”
—The Millions

Sayrafiezadeh captures one of the most essential feelings of the modern-day United States, apathy, and holds us to that feeling.”
—Chicago Review of Books

"Skillful and controlled...[The stories in AMERICAN ESTRANGEMENT] speak, at times quite powerfully, to an overriding feeling of cultural and personal loneliness.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Sayrafiezadeh’s prose is direct and rhythmic, his short and sure sentences moving with the confidence of stated fact.”
—A.V. Club

“[A] vision of American life that is thoughtful and thought-provoking…These are significant stories written in powerful prose.”
—Book Reporter

“A haunting book, and filled with longing.”
—Hilton Als, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of White Girls

“Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a first-rate short story writer. Every sentence is a delight, and his work has a captivating, immersive quality that leaves the reader shaken and moved. American Estrangement is a superb book with a strange and subtle power sure to haunt readers long after they’ve closed the cover.”
—Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Missionaries

“Sad, mordant, and utterly beguiling, this pitch-perfect volume of stories broke my heart. American Estrangement’s characters are endlessly unsettled: stalked by unresolved pasts, trapped in the unbridgeable gulfs of the present moment. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh works like a miniaturist, impeccably tracing invisible negotiations between human beings—and these stories accumulate with a disquieting, invisible power. Every observation is burnished with both recognizable truth and hallucinatory strangeness.”
—David Adjmi, author of Lot Six

“These stories combine the intensity of theater, the humor of your smartest friend, and the emotional insight of the imaginary and gentle god you might wish for and fear as a witness. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is an extraordinary talent, and these stories merit reading and re-reading and re-reading.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

“This book is excellent..Best book of short stories I have read this year. Some darkness here, yes, but the quality of writing is so bloody good. It makes you feel alive as you treasure every word, every line.”
—Roger Bennett, host of Men in Blazers

“The stories in this moving and powerful collection are honest, unaffected, yet full of imagination. Whether set in the recent past or a speculative near future, they explore moments where personal and societal dysfunction converge, in prose that punches through the page. This book’s tough poetry tells us who we are and where we are headed, with equal parts sadness, humor, and hope.”
—Rajesh Parameswaran, author of I Am an Executioner

“American Estrangement is the perfect story collection for our historical moment: darkly suspenseful, funny and unsettling, at once retrospective and revelatory and full of surprises.”
—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot