Writing Before publishing her first novel, Khakpour worked as a journalist, covering arts and entertainment as well as producing in-depth
investigative journalism. As a 19-year-old student at Sarah Lawrence, she interned at
The Village Voice, where she was published for the first time. She later interned at
Spin magazine. In the early 2000s, she was a columnist at both
Paper and
New York magazines, and wrote articles for
MTV.com,
BET.com,
VH1.com,
Gear,
Flaunt, and
Urb. At age 29, Khakpour published her debut novel,
Sons and Other Flammable Objects, in September 2007. It has been interpreted as a response to and "rewriting" of
Sadegh Hedayat's
The Blind Owl.
Sons and Other Flammable Objects was recognized as a
New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, won the 77th
California Book Award in First Fiction., and included on the
Chicago Tribune's 2007 "Fall's Best" list. The novel was also shortlisted for the
William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and longlisted for the 2008
Dylan Thomas Prize. An Italian edition was published by
Bompiani in 2009. In 2011, Khakpour was the guest editor of
Guernica's first Iranian-American issue, curating works from writers including
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh,
Azadeh Moaveni,
Nahid Rachlin,
Hooman Majd,
Roger Sedarat, and
Sholeh Wolpé. Khakpour's second novel,
The Last Illusion, was released on 13 May 2014. Much of the book was completed during writers' residencies at the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA),
Yaddo, and
Ucross, and at the
New Mexico home of her friend
Valerie Plame. Set in New York City during "the Y2K to
9/11 era", the book is a coming-of-age tale about an
albino feral boy, Zal, and is a retelling of a legend from the
Shahnameh, the
Persian Book of Kings. Khakpour has described the novel as "a love letter to New York."
The Last Illusion was named one of
Flavorwire’s "15 Most Anticipated Books of 2014," one of
The Millions’ "Most Anticipated" in its "The Great 2014 Book Review," and one of the
Huffington Post's "30 Books You NEED to Read in 2014."
The Last Illusion has also been published in
Romanian by
Polirom. In 2018, Khakpour published
Sick, a "memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery." Khakpour's most-widely read book,
Sick was named one of
Time magazine's best memoirs of 2018, and was recognized as a "Best Book of 2018" by
Real Simple,
Entropy,
Mental Floss,
Bitch Media,
Autostraddle,
The Paris Review,
Literary Hub, and others.
The Week magazine selected the memoir as 'Book of the week' in June 2018.
Sick was published in the UK and
the Commonwealth by
Canongate in 2018. In 2022, the book was translated and published in a
Hungarian edition. In 2019,
Amazon Original Stories published
Parsnips in Love as an
e-book, which became a best-selling short story. In 2020, Khakpour published her fourth book, an essay collection entitled
Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity, as a Vintage Original from
Penguin Random House. The title is a deliberate reference to
Joan Didion's
The White Album.
Brown Album was named one of
Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2020". Khakpour's fifth book,
Tehrangeles, was published in 2024. The book is a satire "of the rich and
TikTok-famous", set amongst the Persian and Iranian neighborhood
of the same name in Los Angeles.
Tehrangeles follows the lives of the four Milani sisters, Iranian-American snack food heiresses on the verge of their own reality television show.
Kirkus Reviews described the novel as "a kind of hyperreal neon inversion of
Little Women, if the March girls had to deal with hashtags, eating disorders, microaggressions, and group chats".
Tehrangeles was positively reviewed by
Publishers Weekly,
Booklist, and the
Los Angeles Times. On 20 June 2024,
Tehrangeles was selected as
NPR's "Book of the Day."
Teaching After completing her MA at
Johns Hopkins University in 2003, Khakpour was named an Eliott Coleman Fellow and taught creative writing as a lecturer at Johns Hopkins. Between 2008 and 2010, Khakpour was a
visiting professor at
Bucknell University. She subsequently moved to
Santa Fe, New Mexico, to become an assistant professor of creative writing & literature at the
College of Santa Fe, and later served on the faculty of
Fairfield University’s low-residency
MFA program. From 2011 to 2012, she was the Picador Guest Professor of Literature at the
University of Leipzig in Germany. From 2014 to 2017, Khakpour taught at
Bard College as a
writer-in-residence. Khakpour has also been a visiting writer at
Wesleyan University (2014) and
Northwestern University (2017). Khakpour has held
adjunct appointments at
Columbia University,
Fordham University, and
Wesleyan University. She was guest faculty at the
Vermont College of Fine Arts and the
Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the
University of Southern Maine. ==Influences==