Monthly Archives: July, 2024

Memory is impossible

►Thousands in Vietnam mourn at funeral of Communist Party chief Trong ►Vietnam Communist Party Chief’s Funeral Draws Thousands of Mourners, Including World Leaders ►Vietnam's funeral for...

Forthcoming 2025 The first DVAN Writers Residency brought together ten writers and three academics from five different countries to participate in a week-long residency at...

Rooted in the valleys and hillsides of the Trường Sơn Mountain Range, Tuệ Sỹ’s collection, Dreaming the Mountain, is a modern love letter to Vietnam’s nature and culture.

The novel, The Sympathizer, begins in April 1975, as Saigon is about to fall to communist invasion. Soon enough it does, and the war is over. Or is it?

This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

In Paris, in 1934, Bình has accompanied his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to the train station for their departure to America. His own destination is unclear: will he go with “the Steins,” stay in France, or return to his native Vietnam? For five years, he has been the live-in cook at the famous apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Before Bình’s decision is revealed, his mesmerizing narrative catapults us back to his youth in French-colonized Vietnam, his years as a galley hand at sea, and his days turning out fragrant repasts for the doyennes of the Lost Generation.

Tuân is forty years old. Despite the cold of winter, he walks in the Chantilly forest with the hope of witnessing the first daffodils bloom. Slowly, he lets himself be invaded by the buried memories of his Indochinese childhood... Although he remains convinced of having been "almost perfectly happy until the age of twelve", Tuân was nevertheless very early confronted with the terrible mystery of death.

Jade Hidle grew up tweezing her mother’s hairs. As the distance between them grew, she began pulling her own.

Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, this is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.