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Sanam Mahloudji

Biography

Sanam Mahloudji

Sanam Mahloudji was born in Tehran and left during the Islamic Revolution. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Idaho Review, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Mahloudji was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in London with her husband and two children.

Sanam Mahloudji

Books by Sanam Mahloudji

The Persians
by Sanam Mahloudji - Fiction

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch who stayed alone in Tehran during the revolution. There is Niaz, her law-breaking granddaughter who takes her debauchery with a side of purpose. Elizabeth’s daughters left for America in 1979: charismatic yet outrageous Shirin in Houston, and Seema, a dreamy idealist-turned-housewife in Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter Bita, the self-righteous but lost law student eating pancakes and giving away her belongings in New York City. When an annual vacation in Aspen goes awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle status quo is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a quest to restore the family name. But what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Will they ever realize that life is more than just an old story?