Sep. 3, 2014: Critically acclaimed author Porochista Khakpour will discuss her new book, The Last Illusion, on Thursday, September 18, at 7:00 pm in the Sommer Center for Worship and the Performing Arts on the Concordia College campus. A reception with book sales and signing will follow Khakpour's presentation.

The Last Illusion, Khakpour's second novel, is about a feral boy's coming of age in New York and is based on a legend from the medieval Persian epic Shahnameh, The Book of Kings.

The story begins with Zal's birth in a rural Iranian village. Horrified by the pallor of his skin and hair, his demented mother hides him in a birdcage for the next decade, treating him like her other pet birds. Freed at age ten, he is adopted by a behavioral analyst, taken to New York, and struggles to live his life as a human. His bird-like tendencies make him an outsider and, as New York survives one potential disaster, Y2K, and begins hurtling toward another, 9/11, Zal finds himself in a cast of fellow outsiders--a famous illusionist and a disturbed artist who both send Zal's life spiraling into chaos.

Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs, proclaims: "Utterly original and compelling, Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion weaves Iranian myth with very contemporary American neurosis to create a bittersweet poetry all its own. This ambitious, exciting literary adventure is at once grotesque, amusing, deeply sad--and wonderful, too."

Khakpour's first book, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, was named a New York Times Editor's Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune's Fall Best, and winner of the 2007 California Book Award in the First Fiction Category. Her nonfiction has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Spin, Slate, and Salon, among others.

Khakpour currently teaches at Columbia University in its MFA program, Fordham University, and Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.

Pictured here: Book cover of The Last Illusion.

Photo courtesy Ellen de Saint Phalle, Director of Community Relations, Concordia College