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Loạt Soạt

Short Story Collection 'Gills' Pieces Together a Raw and Complex Portrait of Saigon

Saigon’s landscape looks dramatically different from how it did three or even two decades ago. As the country’s economic powerhouse, Saigon has seen rapid urban development: new highrises like Landmark 81 and the Bitexco Financial Tower that now define the city’s skyline, new urban infrastructure like the Ba Son Bridge and Saigon’s first metro line , as well as the city’s expansion into areas like District 7’s Phú Mỹ Hưng and District 2’s Thủ Thiêm. If the west has long viewed Saigon under the shadow of war, it is clear that such a rigid frame fails to contain the Saigon of today, whose entropic inner life seems to constantly overflow; with motorbikes onto sidewalks, loud honks through windows, and rainpour over Saigon’s riverbeds.

Loạt Soạt

Viet Thanh Nguyen's New Essay Collection Is Both Theoretically Sharp and Intimately Tender

Last year, acclaimed Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen published To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other , a collection of six essays adapted from the prestigious Norton Lectures that he delivered at Harvard in 2023–2024.

Loạt Soạt

Meet Dạ Ngân, the Author of the Most Important Vietnamese Novel You've Never Read

When the wind strafes Dạ Ngân’s window, seedpods shake and rattle like spent bullet casings in the tamarind tree that Americans planted decades ago. They also built the large apartment complex where she now lives. It’s an ironic place to call home, considering Dạ Ngân was a resistance fighter in the south during the American War.

Loạt Soạt

Enlightening Misery Under French Rule Explored in 'Light Out and Modern Vietnamese Stories'

Light Out and Modern Vietnamese Stories, 1930–1954 offers the contemporary reader an honest glimpse of a period in Vietnam history characterized by corruption, exploitation, dehumanization, poverty, and starvation. The Vietnamese texts, both a novella and accompanying short stories, not only delineate the immediate influence of French colonization on the sociopolitical functions of Vietnam, an enterprise solely designed for its economic potential, but also expose the extending impact on the quotidian lives of proletarians, particularly the peasantry.

Loạt Soạt

Within the Shocking Brutality of Queer Novel 'Parallels' Rests Poignant Poetry

Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang shocked me. While I refrain from spoiling its plot, allow me to share my experience when reading this novel, as translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn, to better explain how the book jolted me from expectations and why the experience provides a unique and valuable addition to the array of Vietnamese novels translated into English.

Loạt Soạt

A Story of Personal, Political Reckoning in a Singaporean Writer's Fictional Wartime Vietnam

The Immolation first came to me as a bewildering surprise: at a now-relocated bookshop in Singapore, the book caught the eyes of the 17-year-old me. It was not so much the cover’s pale blue background, or the expression of ennui on the author’s post-impressionist portrait, but rather its dealing with the American War. After all, the title directly referenced the iconic protest by the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself on fire on the street of Saigon.

Loạt Soạt

A Touch of Magical Realism in ‘The Cemetery of Chua Village’ by Đoàn Lê

Vietnam transitioned to a market economy like an old train lurching to life: momentous shakes and shudders, steam bursting out busted gaskets, disheveled cargo tumbling from luggage racks, sparks shooting off wheels screeching across warped rails and a whistle ripping into the placid sky.