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false tooth picture

the best memory of my life / also consists of the worst one / visiting my grandparents in / Malaysia

“On Starting Over Again”: A Conversation Between Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Ly Tran

After having written my first book, I feel as though I'm in this incredible transition or transformative phase. In preparation for this novel, I am reinventing myself in a sense, and shedding all the layers of the person that I was when I was working on my first book.

Book Review: Mythical Man by David Ly

To enter the world of David Ly’s debut collection Mythical Man is to enter the body of Ly’s imagined monster: a monster erected to...

A Tight Fit

Spoken word recording:   You asked me how my hair got so black, and in your very next breath, told me to go back where do you want...

Laboured

Your breath is / only learning its way eager, sporadic, chasing / the world to catch up

Book Review: She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

At the center of She is a Haunting is Nhà Hoa, or “Flower House”, a 1920s villa built by French colonizers in Đà Lạt, and abandoned by the French and Americans after the Vietnam War.

In the Diaspora: February 2023

►Liberal Party’s first Vietnamese MP shares story of perilous boat journey ►Chinese ship threatens and confiscates catch of Vietnamese boat off Paracel Islands ►Vietnam Communist Party...

Laughable-lamentable Irresistible Love: A Conversation with Translator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

The novel offers a rather informal, unjournalistic, fragmentary and linearity-defying transmission of these little stories about a village that seems so alive but, at the same time, seems to be receding into the elusive substance of memory. As mentioned several times in the book, this kind of chronicle, in its disorderliness, is frequently erased from official history.

The Structures of Trust

My dad recalled his first supernatural encounter during one of the trips down the dirt-roads-turned-trenches. Surrounded by melaleucas on both sides like the devils' crooked arms doming over in the dark, they were in search of drylands where grass and straw were left untouched by water for the cattle at home.

Poems and Visuals by DACBEET

A birthday card as a placemat for spit coated fishbones / Celebration of life and death and near-death / I looked at the ghost in the eye with a taunt / If you are going to take me, take me now — / You won’t.