Book Group Expo 2006 presents the Opening Salon featuring Khaled Hosseini with moderator Susanne Pari.
Part salon, part marketplace, and part marvelous party, Book Group Expo brings together a wide variety of book lovers, and authors under one roof. The Expo is an opportunity for the thousands of serious readers and book group members from throughout the Bay Area to experience a unique interactive program built around reading and discussing literature.
Bio
Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at a large high school in Kabul. In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris. They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army.
The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States. In September of 1980, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California. Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor's degree in Biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego's School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Hosseini was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.
While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001. In 2003, The Kite Runner, was published and has since become an international bestseller, published in 38 countries. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns will be published in May of 2007. He lives in northern California.
Susanne Pari
Susanne Pari's novel, The Fortune Catcher, is a love story and a painless history lesson on the Iran-America situation. It has been translated into six languages. She was an advisor to Edgework Press and the Program Director for their Literary Salons. She has contributed to The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio, and Voice of America.
She sees her job as Program Director for Book Group Expo as a sly opportunity to read every book of every participating author without feeling guilty that she's having so much fun.
Khaled Hosseini seems to have injected a lot of personal life experience into his novel. It is intriguing how often "real" life experience affects works of fiction. Perhaps this is why so many authors state that "there is no greater truth than fiction." Still, it is unfortunate that we can not trust the mainstream news media to give us a proper account of world events, or even events in our own country.