Literature

Fiery Souls: Poets Trần Dạ Từ and Nhã Ca in Exile

For Vietnamese people living through the wartime, or even younger generations growing up in peace, many of them have loved and learned by heart powerful poems by Trần Dạ Từ and Nhã Ca. They are literary luminaries of their generation whose poems have mesmerized, tormented, wounded, and inspired anyone reading them.

Book Review: Lucky Ticket

Lucky Ticket takes its place alongside other collections like Andrew Lam’s Birds of Paradise Lost, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, and Nam Le’s The Boat.

Anam ~ a novel excerpt by André Dao

The entrance to the library is forbidding enough – the library’s six-storey wings run north and south of the tower like fortress walls – but once inside, through the pass card activated turnstiles, the Library opens itself up to the willing reader.

Book Review: Seven of Infinities

Seven of Infinities is set in the Xuya Universe, an alternate future universe where Asian empires, including Đại Việt, won the space race and spread across the galaxies. In a quiet corner of Đại Việt’s empire hides Vân, a scholar who elects to spend her days tutoring a student rather than aspiring to pass the imperial exams due to secrets she divulges to no one.

Apocalypse Never: Writing Our Origin Stories and Imaginative Futures as Montagnard Americans

If history is made durable by the survival of the written records, as Montagnard Americans in the twenty-first century, a radical act against our historical erasure is to write our stories now.

Book Review: Reenactments

Hai-Dang Phan, however, is not interested in simply pathologizing his parents; nor does he pretend that he can be an adequate storyteller of their pasts. Rather, Phan lingers within the liminality of reenactments, not just as an imperfect portal into history, but as a mysterious realm in its own right.