Seyran saroyan biography of williams
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Interview: Nancy Agabian
Set alternately in Yerevan, Armenia, and Queens, New York, Nancy Agabian’s novel The Fear of Large and Small Nations is a beautifully crafted interweaving of third-person storytelling with first-person metawriting and journaling. The main character is Na, a young bisexual woman who moves to Armenia to reclaim her cultural roots and immerse herself in the raw beauty of her homeland and people. She is a diasporan, one of millions of Armenian diasporans who were not born in their native land as a result of the Armenian Genocide of , an overlooked genocide denied by the Turkish government for over a century. Thus, Armenians who survived and fled have passed on their lineage, culture, and history to their children and future generations.
Agabian is a writer, activist, and educator. The complexity of her novel is breathtaking in the parallels she creates between Na’s disillusionment of Armenia’s homophobia and adoption of strict gender roles and her experience of falling in love with a younger, bisexual Armenian man, who proves to be destructive. Both challenge her identity, leaving her bewildered and disconnected from herself. Nancy’s previous book, a memoir, Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, is in many ways a prelude to
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Nancy Agabian, the author of Princess Freak () and Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (), returns with PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction finalist, The Fear of Large and Small Nations, which was released today.
In The Fear of Large and Small Nations, feminist writer and teacher Natalee—aka Na—flees the conservative fearmongering of George W. Bush’s America in favor of reclaiming her cultural roots in post-Soviet Armenia. As she contends with rigid gender roles and rampant homophobia, learning the language when her linguistic roots in the Ottoman Empire have all but disappeared, and centering her identity as a bisexual Armenian American woman amid her own secret desire for love, Na is soon left with more questions than answers about where her fractured self belongs in the world.
When she falls for Seyran, a much-younger bisexual punk rocker who seems to value her for who she is, it comes as a relief: in a culture where marriage is seen as a source of protection for women, Na has the satisfaction of subverting societal expectations by shielding Seyran from conscription and, after marrying and moving to New York together, deportation. But when Seyran reveals an abusive side, Na realizes she is trapped in a dangerous codependent web
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