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A poignant and timely collection about friendship, community, identity and belonging for readers of Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis and Britt Bennett
Siamak Vossoughi’s new short story collection, The Friend Seekers is a tender yet sharp collection of stories. A stranger learns how to adapt to a new town as an Iranian-American who is regularly asked if he’s on the “right side,” a family struggles with the death of a loved one at a store shooting, and a small girl contemplates the meaning of friendship and encourages her Baba to find one. These are stories of yearning and coming-of-age, of identity and what it means to Iranian and American amidst the ever-widening cultural divide. Even the most unlikeable characters are hard to hate under Vossoughi’s pen as he prioritizes humanity in even the most difficult moments on the page. These taught, singular stories are disarming in their simplicity, but radical in their call to be a different kind of neighbor, citizen, and friend.
"From playgrounds and strip malls to after school language programs, TheFriend Seekers delivers a rich tapestry of the Iranian American diaspora told with heat, humor, and razor sharp observation about what it means "to be" when answering exploring one's identity is anything but simple. An assured collection of stories that is timely, relevant, and powerful."
–Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark
"I fought the sting of tears at many points while reading the stories in Siamak Vossoughi’s The Friend Seekers, [...]. These tip-of-the-iceberg stories are anything but small. The people in them are determined to find a moral logic in the world, and their gestures toward justice and a shared humanity contain great depths of sorrow and joy and longing. The fierce yet quiet spirit that quickens these stories speaks in tones filled—somehow and at once—with both heartbreak and hope. Now more than ever we need to hear its voice."
–Jeff P. Jones, author of Bloodshot Stories
"I’ve often claimed short stories as my first love, but that’s not quite right: short stories are more like trusted friends to call upon when we need them. They're the sort of friends a dutiful child might wish her solitary father would make; the sort someone new to town might be eager to meet at the local pub. And if you, too, seek friends who are funny yet philosophical, brutally honest but full of hope—friends who teach hard lessons, even as they soothe you and make you feel less alone—you will find them in this striking collection by Siamak Vossoughi"
–Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, author of Off the Books
Siamak Vossoughi is an Iranian-American writer whose publications include The Friend Seekers (2026), A Sense of the Whole (2019) which was selected by Victor LaValle for the Orison Fiction Prize and Better Than War (2015), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award. He won the New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest (2025) and the Pithead Chapel Larry Brown Short Story Award (2023) and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (2022). His writing has appeared in over fifty journals and literary magazines including The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus,Columbia Journal, and Tupelo Quarterly to name a few. He lives in Seattle.