anthology How I Learned to Cook and Other Writ-
ings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships.
Her works of short fiction have appeared in more
than 50 magazines and literary journals. Awards
she has received for her writing include the Ben-
nett Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Award,
and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Be-
sides her latest novel, Jumping over Fire (2006), she
also published Persian Girls (2006), a memoir that
traces her relationship with a sister who remained
in Iran and the separate paths of their lives.
In high demand as a reader, Rachlin has read in
countless bookstores, schools, libraries, institutes,
universities, and literary centers. She has taught
at Barnard College, Yale University, and a variety
of prestigious conferences across the nation. She
teaches creative writing at the New School Uni-
versity in New York and the Unterberg Poetry
Center.
Zohra SaedRahman, Imad (1970– )
Imad Rahman was born and raised in Karachi,
Pakistan, and educated at the Karachi Grammar
School. Though he found nothing particularly in-
spirational or stimulating in the readings he en-
countered as a student in Pakistan, Rahman was
quite taken by J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (novels which would
later have an obvious influence on his own fic-
tion) when he first discovered them at the age of
- Rahman moved to the United States in pursuit
of higher education at the age of 18 and eventu-
ally earned an M.A. in English from Ohio State
University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from
the University of Florida. It was during his time
in college that Rahman fully developed his talent
for writing fiction, feeling that fiction writing was
the only thing he could do particularly well. After
graduating from the University of Florida, Rahman
was elected the 2001–02 James C. McReight Fic-
tion Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative
Writing. Rahman’s short stories have appeared in a
variety of literary publications. After teaching cre-
ative writing for several years at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, Rahman is now an assistant
professor of English at Kansas State University.
Rahman’s first book, I Dream of Microwaves
(2004), is a collection of interrelated short stories
that satirize the Great American Dream. The pri-
mary narrator of the stories is a Pakistani-Ameri-
can actor named Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who is
constantly thwarted in his pursuit of fame and
success by an endless stream of absurd occur-
rences. Through his vast knowledge of Western
culture—popular actors and movies, in particu-
lar—Kareem is ultimately able to draw inspiration
and begin to cope with the numerous misadven-
tures and follies that seem to characterize his life.
In the collection’s title story “I Dream of Micro-
waves,” Kareem is fired from his job of playing a
real-life Mexican fugitive on the American tele-
vision show America’s Most Wanted, leading him
to comment that “I couldn’t even get typecast as
a criminal of Pakistani origin. Perhaps people of
Pakistani origin did not commit enough heinous
crimes or did not perform enough acts of extraor-
dinary mediocrity.” In an even greater twist, Ka-
reem decides to pose as his ex-girlfriend’s Bosnian
refugee fiancé to help her obtain her inheritance
from her dying grandmother, only to find that his
ex-girlfriend has hired another actor to pose as yet
another fiancé, this time a destitute African canni-
bal. In “Real Life, Actual Life,” Kareem and his new
girlfriend work for a video rental agency and are
sent, in the spirit of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to
collect an overdue movie from a man named Mr.
Patel, who also happens to be a Hollywood pro-
ducer. In “Here Come the Dog People,” Kareem
is hired to play the role of the late comedian and
actor John Belushi in a production of a play en-
titled John, Ono, John, about a fictitious love affair
between Belushi and Yoko Ono.
Despite the endless absurdities that seem to
surround Kareem’s life, Rahman never crosses over
into the realm of the truly ridiculous or trite. Even
the oddest of his stories are still full of humor and,
moreover, genuine pathos. Kareem’s world, for all
of its improbabilities and maddening happenings,
is one that is quite familiar to us all. Throughout his
stories, Rahman writes sensitively and insightfully
of not only the Pakistani experience in America,250 Rahman, Imad