The Friend Seekers

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, comes The Friend Seekers by Siamak Vossoughi, a poignant and timely collection about friendship, community, identity and belonging for readers of Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis and Britt Bennett In his new book The Friend Seekers, Siamak Vossoughi’s stories insist on tenderness and careful consideration to the inner worlds of others. A stranger learns to adapt to a new town; a family struggles to understand the death of a loved one in a public shooting; and in the title story a small girl contemplates the meaning of friendship and what it would mean for her father to have one. These are stories of yearning and coming-of-age, of identity and what it means to be Iranian and American amidst the ever-widening cultural divide. Even the most unlikeable characters are hard to hate under Vossoughi’s pen as he prioritizes humanity in even the most difficult moments on the page. These taught, singular stories are disarming in their simplicity, but radical in their call to be a different kind of neighbor, citizen, and friend.