BOOKS: Sohrab Homi Fracis, author of "A Man of the World"

The following is a guest post by SAJAer T DAVAR, a writer and expert on all things Parsi.

Author Sohrab Homi Fracis just finished a November 3 reading in Manhattan, celebrating Slice Magazine’s Fall “Fear” issue.        

 

Florida-based Fracis was the first South Asian author (and the first Asian, he thinks) to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, juried via the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2001, his short story collection, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America, won the Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press.

 

Slice is a lively, theme-centered literary magazine whose featured authors have included Salman Rushdie and Junot Diaz, among others.

 

The story Fracis read, "Distant Vision," is from his upcoming novel, A Man of the World.  The story, about an Indian Parsi Zoroastrian boy’s damaged eyesight, and the harm that damaged perspective can cause, is a theme central to his in-progress novel. Another excerpt, "Country Roads," will be in the South Asian Review’s next fiction issue.

 

This reading, at the Center for Fiction in midtown, featured Fracis and other Slice Fall 2009 contributors Sara Lippmann, Anthony Carelli, Matthew Lansburgh, Charity Shumway, and Claire Dunnington.

Fracis was jazzed by the spirited event: “The Center for Fiction's spacious reading room overflowed with people seated all the way down the connecting corridor to the wine table. A nice scattering of desis were among the audience, including a couple of old friends and a handful of NYC Parsis who came up and chatted afterward. They said they really enjoyed my story, including the Parsi characters and setting (the Dina Hotel in Mahabaleshwar). I also got some heartfelt compliments from Slice editors Celia Johnson and Maria Gagliano, who are also respected book editors.”

 

Fracis’s upcoming novel takes themes he dealt with previously – navigating racial and cultural identity, transitions, and limbo – into a starker and more complex realm. A Man of the World is a psychological novel about an immigrant's lasting reaction to a petty assault. Viraf Adajania has the bad timing to arrive in the U.S. in the wake of the American Iran hostage crisis, a time of widespread xenophobia. Standing between him and the forces of hate and fear – in a battle for his heart and mind reflecting the Zoroastrian apocalyptic battle between the spirits of light and darkness – are the forces of love and peace, in the form of his flower-child, rock-band neighbors. 

 

Fracis had started the novel years ago, then set it aside for many more years. He took it up again while an artist-in-residence at the legendary Yaddo artists’ community (he believes he’s the first Parsi to be invited).  “I hope it can be a novel for these international and violent times; a story of a world that is nevertheless slowly coming together,” notes Fracis. Stay tuned.

 

LINKS:

http://www.fracis.com/
http://www.slicemagazine.org