Stories from the Edge of the Sea

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

Returns 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.