Brief Encounters with the Enemy
Brief Encounters with the Enemy
The Dial Press, 2013
When The New Yorker published a short story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in 2010, it marked the emergence of a startling new voice in fiction. In this astonishing book, Sayrafiezadeh conjures up a nameless American city and its unmoored denizens: a call-center employee jealous of the attention lavished on a co-worker newly returned from a foreign war; a history teacher dealing with a classroom of maliciously indifferent students; a grocery store janitor caught up in a romantic relationship with a kleptomaniac customer. These men’s struggles and fleeting triumphs—with women, with cruel bosses, with the morning commute—are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange. Sometimes the effect is hilarious, as when a would-be suitor tries to take his sheltered, religious date on a tunnel of love carnival ride. Other times it’s devastating, as in the unforgettable story that gives the book its title: A soldier on his last routine patrol on a deserted mountain path finally encounters “the enemy” he’s long sought a glimpse of.
“[A] searing vision of his wayward homeland, delivered not in the clamoring rhetoric of a revolutionary, but in the droll monologues of young men who kill because they lack the moral imagination to do otherwise. —New York Times Editor’s Choice
Shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize Shortlist, among other honors.
In an interview conducted via email and over coffee in New York, Saïd discussed how he moved forward as a writer following the success of his memoir, and what it means to be a politically engaged citizen.
PEN Member Saïd Sayrafiezadeh reads from his new collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with the Enemy, at McNally Jackson Books and is followed by a Q&A with fellow PEN Member Sam Lipsyte.