Trevor Laurence Jockims
In Said Sayrafiezadeh’s new collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With The Enemy, the author takes on America’s seemingly unending wars and the moral ambivalence that can come from engaging in them. The book follows Sayrafiezadeh’s acclaimed debut, When Skateboards Will Be Free, which detailed his upbringing as the son of a Jewish mother and an Iranian father, and the family’s complex relationship to radical politics in the 1970s and 80s. Brief Encounters, Sayrafiezadeh’s first book of fiction, reveals his talent for creating the interior worlds of a variety of characters. In an interview conducted via email and over coffee 
In Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s mammoth, six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, the trivial and the momentous mix, change places, and push the work beyond the limits of categorization. At once a Proustian chronicle of the everyday and a latter-day account of a man’s need for, if not a room, then a few hours of his own in which to write, Knausgaard’s work—a controversial sensation in Norway—has been called “the most significant literary enterprise of our time.” In a series of generous, thoughtful e-mails—some sent from “a balcony in a hotel in Beirut,” where the writer was attending the