 The Boat
(Knopf, 2008)
by Nam Le
Released May 13, 2008
288 pages/$22.95
Nam Le is not your typical American writer and for that--we should be thankful. In fact, he's not even American.
Le and his family fled Vietnam in 1979 and eventually resettled in Australia. At the beginning of his career as an attorney, Le quit and applied to one graduate creative writing program in the United States\the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop\and the rest ,as they say, is history.
His debut book is a collection of short stories titled The Boat (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). The stories are reflective of their writer: eclectic, diverse, true in their toughness, and giving in their complexity. In "Cartagena," Colombian youths dream of better days in their locked-in bitter lives as hustlers and hitmen. In "Meeting Elise," a father seeks redemption with his estranged daughter, a gifted musician, but can't get out of his own way. Ever.
And for those looking for the latest in Vietnamese American via Australian literature, check out these two gems: "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" was published in Zoetrope: All Story and selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. It is art at its highest form incorporating satire, metafiction, homage, and social critique into a story about a writer and his father and the infamous My Lai Massacre. The title story "The Boat" is a fictional story about boat people fleeing Vietnam. It is filled with so much emotional truth, it borders the line with non-fiction. The tale of a boy, his mother, and a young escapee, it does for boat people what Ham Tran's film "Journey From the Fall" did, what art must always do: It turned a tale into an experience and brought us that much closer to one another.
by Ky-Phong Tran
About the Author
Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. Currently the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, he has published work in Zoetrope: All Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. He divides his time between Australia and the United States. For more info go to www.namleonline.com
For an exclusive interview with Nam Le, click here
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