Stories From The Edge Of The Sea eBook

AUTHOR OF THE PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD WINNER, PERFUME DREAMS: REFLECTIONS ON THE VIETNAMESE DIASPORA• AUTHOR OFBIRDS OF PARADISE LOST, the widely taught and anthologized debut short story collection • Andrew Lam returns witha literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America.

“Universal and personal.”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author ofThe Woman Warrior • “Will be read and studied for years to come.”—Noël Alumit, author ofMusic Heard in Hi-Fi • “Maps the moveable feast of the Vietnamese diaspora.”—Scott Lankford, author ofTahoe 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 ofAt 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 ofReturns 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.