Brief Encounters with the Enemy

The first short story collection from a writer who calls to mind such luminaries as Denis Johnson, George Saunders, and Nathan Englander

When The New Yorker published a short story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in 2010, it marked the emergence of a startling new voice in fiction, one at first glance disarmingly plainspoken and affecting, and yet also deeply ironical and uncanny in its lingering power. 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 “Love Boat” 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.

Upon giving the author the Whiting Writers’ Award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, the judges hailed his writing as “intelligent, funny, utterly unsmug and unpreening.” These fiercely original stories show their author employing his considerable gifts to offer a lens on our collective dreams and anxieties, casting them in a revelatory new light.

Praise for Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and When Skateboards Will Be Free

“Sayrafiezadeh writes with extraordinary power and restraint. . . . This writer’s prose has some of [Isaac Bashevis] Singer’s wistful comedy, and a good deal of that writer’s curiosity about the places where desire, self-sacrifice and societal obligation intersect and collide.”—The New York Times

“[Sayrafiezadeh] writes with grace and clarity about growing up juggling deprivation and desire.”—Time

“A brave, honest and elegant book. It felt like the story was being whispered in my ear. I haven’t read a memoir in quite a while that has so skillfully made sense of an American childhood.”—Colum McCann