Author of Bone Worship Reads at BB

Bone Worship, a debut novel from Eugene-based Iranian-American author Elizabeth Eslami, tells the story of Jasmine, a young Iranian-American who has dropped out of college just shy of graduation after a failed romance. She has moved back into her parent's house in small-town Georgia, and her Iranian father has in mind an arranged marriage for her.

Furious at his plans, yet also confused and more than a little intrigued, Jasmine meets suitor after suitor with increasingly disastrous and humorous results. Bone Worship, a cross-cultural coming of age story, is a book seven years in the making. The title comes from an elephant tradition of handling the bones of their dead.

Eslami was born in South Carolina. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has published several short stories and articles. Bone Worship is her first novel.

Karen Munro, from the wonderful website Portland Reading Local, recently interviewed Eslami about her novel and her writing process. You can link to the full interview here. In the interview, Eslami comments that "nothing quite matches the euphoria of finding the rhythm of a story or the voice you need to pull the reader through a piece. In those moments, it hardly feels like work....My best strategy is to work on several things simultaneously so that if something really isn't working, I can switch to a different project."

Elizabeth Eslami joins us at Broadway Books Tuesday night (March 16) at 7 pm to read from Bone Worship and talk about the process of writing the book. We hope you can join us! Here's a trailer for the book: