Porochista Khakpour on her novel ‘The Last Illusion’

Porochista Khakpour talks about her new novel, The Last Illusion, a fabulist novel about a feral boy coming of age in New York that's based on a legend from the medieval Persian epic The Shahnameh, the Book of Kings. Khakpour tells the story of Zal, whose demented mother is horrified by the pallor of his skin and hair and becomes convinced she has given birth to a “White Demon.” She hides him in a birdcage and where he lives for the next decade. Freed from his cage and adopted by a behavioral analyst, Zal awakens in New York to the possibility of a future.