Familiar Strangers

A Kurdish refugee relives her terrifying flight to safety over the mountains in the midst of labor and childbirth in America. An American Peace Corps volunteer inadvertently insults the Shah’s mother-in-law and gets himself thrown out of Iran, but not before he clandestinely marches in a secretive and bloody political demonstration. An Armenian woman at odds with her mother who survived the Genocide takes up Turkish studies. A grad student in Mideast Studies embarrasses her professor by belly dancing in front of him and his fiancee at a Middle East night club.

These four stories and seven others comprise the collection I have titled “FAMILIAR STRANGERS: Stories from America and the Middle East.” Most have already been published in a variety of literary and popular magazines including CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, ARARAT, PANGYRUS, KALLIOPE, IOWA WOMAN, and WEST MAGAZINE, the former Sunday magazine section of THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS. In addition, one of the stories was the basis for a full length play produced and staged here in Silicon Valley to sold out shows ______

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