A few paragraphs into "A New Persian Empire," the prefatory essay of her new collection Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour writes: "Since 9/11, we have been living in a winter of discontent after more than three decades of discontentment."

Much of the work of Brown Album is about articulating those stories of brown America that are being simultaneously lived beside, and erased from, mainstream work concerned with equating Americanness with whiteness such as The White Album. Khakpour's work is correction and visibility: about centering the brownness that has been erased from this literary cultural analysis — and accompanying conversations.

There is a refreshing anger, at times, in these pages and rightfully so. Khakpour's anger is directed at erasure, at misogyny and racism, at anti-Muslim and anti-Iranian policies, at healthcare inequalities stemming in large part from environmental racism. "I loved this country," writes Khakpour. "I accepted it and never, until much later, considered that it might not accept me."

This is not to say that there is only one tone in Khakpour's collection of essays. In "The King of Tehrangeles," for example, Khakpour's laconic wit is evident in her looking at the contradiction of how wealthy, light-skinned immigrants of color often cleave to conservative ideologies in America, still fancying themselves members of the elite class back home, not realizing they are no longer the elite here and are working against their own self-interests.

Throughout the collection, the figure of Los Angeles becomes a palpable breathing character — the Westside riches of Brentwood and Beverly Hills she dubs Tehrangeles with its wealthy Iranians; the "poorer" working-class areas of South Pasadena she grew up in; the racist and heavily segregated Glendale of her parent's retirement; the expectations from her fellow Tehrangelenos that she would be rich because she was Iranian: "'Persian girl, how did this happen to you?' a heavily bejeweled elderly Iranian woman, turning up what must have been her third or fourth nose, once said to me as she spotted me sweeping outside the store," Khakpour writes.

Khakpour is uncomfortable with the incongruence of Iranians at home in Iran, many still feeling the effects of revolution and foreign invasions, contrasted with those at ease in wealth in the SoCal diaspora. Critiquing such representations, popularized by TV shows such as Shahs of Sunset and films like A Separation, she asks: "Who can capture a young diaspora doing as young diasporas do: huffing freedom and crashing and burning, trying on and discarding selves made up of their parents' hand-me-down post-traumatic stress disorder?"