MICHAEL ISAAC SHOKRIAN
AMERICAN PLAYGROUND
It’s 1971, and 7-year-old Mishel Manoucherian’s family has packed up their life in Tehran and moved to Los Angeles, launching him headfirst into a disorienting new world of social and schoolyard expectations. At once a witty and warm exploration of the immigrant experience
and coming of age tale, American Playground illuminates the Iranian American experience through a child’s unique perspective.
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It’s 1971, and 7-year-old Mishel Manoucherian’s family has packed up their life in Tehran and moved to Los Angeles, launching him headfirst into a disorienting new world of social and schoolyard expectations. At once a witty and warm exploration of the immigrant experience and coming of age tale, American Playground illuminates the Iranian American experience through a child’s unique perspective.
News
Created by Michael Isaac Shokrian, the Thieving Magpie started in 2017 as a digital literary magazine dedicated to procuring and publishing good art: fiction, poetry, essays, art, photography. It seeks writers and artists who take their art and mischief seriously. New and emerging voices and visions will share these pages with experienced writers and artists who believe in their craft. We don’t seek perfection, just dedication to the process, craft and truth in art.
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“In the tradition of the best immigrant novels, Michael Shokrian’s American Playground is that rare literary novel that manages at once to inform and entertain. Lyrical, raw, funny, and enlightening, it will draw you in and keep you hooked. It will make you wish you could read more slowly and want to turn the page as quickly as possible. If you know anything at all about Los Angeles in the last half-century, or about the joys and travails of becoming American, you will discover in this book all the truths you never knew you knew.”
Gina Nahai,
author of The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.
“American Playground is a timely and entertaining novel that captures the Immigrant experience with humor, honesty and immediacy. It is a colorful snapshot of an Iranian family in transition as well as a keenly recalled time capsule of American culture in the early ‘70s.
Shokrian walks a perilous tightrope, telling a story through the eyes of a child but with the retrospective insight of an adult; somehow he manages to find the perfect voice, and get you to root for his underdog protagonist every step of the way.”
Omid Arabian,
author of You are Everything