About the Book
AUTHOR OF THE PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD WINNER, PERFUME DREAMS: REFLECTIONS ON THE VIETNAMESE DIASPORA - AUTHOR OF BIRDS OF PARADISE LOST, the widely taught and anthologized debut short story collection - Andrew Lam returns with a literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America.
"Universal and personal."--Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior - "Will be read and studied for years to come."--Noël Alumit, author of Music Heard in Hi-Fi - "Maps the moveable feast of the Vietnamese diaspora."--Scott Lankford, author of Tahoe Beneath the Surface - "Lam's most lyrical and wide-ranging collection yet."--Matthew Spangler, playwright - "For anyone who has loved and lost a lover, a landscape, a home."--Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life - "Taste the desires of comedians, soldiers, tomboys, friends, queers, mothers, and refugees."--Long Bui, author of Returns of War: South Vietnam
At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband's death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover's home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam's short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart barely explored country.
About the Author :
Andrew Lam fled Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975 when he was 11 years old. He attended the University of California, Berkeley studying biochemistry but abandoned plans for medical school after graduation. He entered the creative writing program at San Francisco State University instead. While still in school he began writing for Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He wrote for many newspapers and magazines since, including the National Geographic Traveler, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and The Nation. A regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered for over 7 years, Lam is the author of 3 books, and has won the Pen Open Book Award and The Josephine Miles Literary Award and many others. He served as a Journalism Fellow at Stanford 2001-02. In 2004 a PBS documentary about his life called "My Journey Home" in which a film crew followed him back to Vietnam was aired nationwide. Lam is working on a novel and a memoir about his childhood in Vietnam during the war. He has lectured at many universities and colleges and taught as a writer in residence at San Jose State University in 2015-2016. He lives in San Francisco.
Review :
"Andrew Lam's latest collection liberates immigrant fiction from its corset of wistful longing and gives it a voice that's salty, sassy and sexy. If writing could have an umami flavour, Andrew Lam has found it. His stories traverse generations and continents, segueing from immigrant dreams of a land of milk and honey to the reality of "no money, no honey" with ease, at much at home in nail salons, high schools and manicured Californian suburbs as in a small leaky refugee boat on the high seas."
--Sandip Roy, radio host, novelist, commentator, and author of Don't Let Him Know
"Andrew Lam might've entitled this book War and Love, so universal and personal are his stories. I promise you: read Stories from the Edge of the Sea, and you will receive gifts of wonder and grief, shock and delight."
--Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and others
"Andrew Lam is a master of the short story form. In each tale, a world is expertly built and emotions finely drawn. Stories from the Edge of the Sea is a gem of a collection--poignant, uplifting, complex, and wildly relatable. This book will be read and studied for years to come."
--Noël Alumit, author of Music Heard in Hi-Fi and Letters to Montgomery Clift
"No one maps the moveable feast of the Vietnamese diaspora like Andrew Lam. From stand-up comedians to social chameleons, from college student strivers to lovelorn lawyers taking a striptease walk on the wild side, Lam's characters feel like old friends with shocking secrets to unfold--forced to confront the lost country of the human heart."
--Scott Lankford, author of Tahoe Beneath the Surface
"Andrew Lam has long been one of the leading chroniclers of the Vietnamese diaspora experience in the United States. This new collection, moreover, secures his position among a coterie of writers exploring notions of home, migration, and belonging in global and transborder contexts. Weaving a tapestry of locations from the Berkeley Hills to the bougainvillea-covered walls of Saigon, the streets of San Francisco, and the business-class section of a commercial jet high over the South China Sea, with characters whose accents wander between California, Paris, and Saigon, this is Lam's most lyrical and wide-ranging collection yet."
--Matthew Spangler, playwright, notable for adaptations of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, The Kite Runner, and Tortilla Curtain
"These stories powerfully evoke the emotional world of the displaced, struggling to find their (our?) ways amid the roadless landscapes of post-colonial late-stage capitalism. Moving and poignant, Lam's perceptions are at times funny, at other times tragic, always underlain with a bass note of nostalgia for a vanished world. Stories from the Edge of the Sea complements Lam's earlier, equally fine collection Birds of Paradise Lost. Together with Perfume Dreams, his collection of essays, readers receive superbly complex insights into diaspora--for those Vietnamese forced from their country, of course, but for anyone who has loved and lost a lover, a landscape, a home."
--Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life
"In this personal collection of stories, Andrew Lam bathes readers in a soup of memory. From Vietnamese wartime villas to college flats in Berkeley, we taste the desires of comedians, soldiers, tomboys, friends, queers, mothers, and refugees. Lam reveals a loving community where acts of care are savored and stirred to perfection."
--Long Bui, author of Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory
"With wit and tenderness, Andrew Lam consistently subverts conventions familiar to diasporic literature. Humor, linguistic virtuosity, and wholly original voices abound in Stories from the Edge of the Sea's tightly crafted narratives."
--Paul Christiansen, editor of Saigoneer and author of Beneath Saigon's Chò Nâu
"Stories from the Edge of the Sea transcends mere storytelling; it is a symphony of human experiences, a mirror reflecting life's myriad shades, leaving readers quietly lacerated and deeply enthralled with the jouissance of every moment within its pages."
--Quynh H. Vo
"Andrew Lam's Stories from The Edge of the Sea beautifully offers tales of longing, repression, and love as he recalls experiences of immigration and confronts the ruptures amidst generational memories. These stories are indelible, profound, and unforgettable."
--Lynn Novick, codirector of The Vietnam War
"Andrew Lam's first collection of short stories richly rendered the quest for a new identity by the immigrant generation of Vietnamese-Americans created at the end of the war. In his new collection, Lam portrays the next generation in their unique challenges. These are inherently complex stories not just of the loss of a past self but the loss of a self that never had a chance to be. Stories from the Edge of the Sea is an important and resonantly universal book for this difficult time in American history.
--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"While the stories in this rich, complex collection cover a wide swath of subjects, this autobiography informs his characters' feelings, their relationships to family, friends, employers, and homelands past and present... [There are] wide-ranging tales united by narrators with shared histories and questions of belonging."
--Kirkus Reviews
