Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. His work has
appeared in Zoetrope, A Public Space, One Story, Conjunctions, and
the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading
anthologies. The fiction editor of the Harvard Review, he
splits his time between Australia and abroad.
www.namleonline.com
"Nam Le's lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits
enormous visceral power. . . . A remarkable collection." —The
New York Times
"Nam Le is extraordinary, a writer who must - who will - be heard.
. . .The Boat's vision and its power are timeless." —Mary
Gaitskill
"Astounding. . . . A refreshingly diverse and panoramic
debut." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated. . . . Moving and
unforgettable." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . .
. . Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten." —Junot
Díaz
"Lyrical . . . Powerful and assured. . . . [Le's] kaleidoscopic
world view is on display throughout the stories, which seamlessly
blend cultural traditions, accents and landscapes that run from
lush to barren." —The Miami Herald
"Stunning. . . .These stories are so beautifully written and cross
emotional barriers of time and place with such clear vision and
strong command of language we can only wonder with awe what Nam Le
will offer us next." —The Oregonian
"A collection that takes the reader across the globe. From Iowa to
Colombia to Australia and Iran, the characters in Le’s stories each
shape the world around them. In each story, the protagonists create
a new atmosphere. . . .While Le is a writer who seems to be
interested in the issues of the world, he is also a writer
interested in the young. . . . Le does not downplay the lives of
his children as fiction often does when portraying younger
characters but presents them with a seriousness and intelligence
that is refreshing. . . . The Boat is an impressive debut from a
writer with a lot more to give. A writer to be
remembered." —Marion Frisby, The Denver Post
"Powerful . . . Lyrical . . . Devastating . . . A harsh and
masterful effort, each tale a clean shot through the heart, the aim
true. In seven stories covering six continents and an ocean, Le
delivers a powerful and assured vision that offers a clear look at
his impressive talents. . . . Le is the sort of writer who taps
directly into the vein of desperation and offers no shelter. He’s
not for the faint of heart, but the reward for soldiering on in the
toughness of his world is the welcome recognition of a voice clear
and brave." —Amy Driscoll, The Miami Herald
"Captivating . . . An uncannily mature debut [that] distills time,
experience . . . There’s a streak of the naturalist in Nam Le that
looks back to such writers as Emile Zola, Stephen Crane and
Theodore Dreiser. . . . It is a searing portrait of survival, love
and sacrifice, which seems revelatory and wise. It is [Le’s] ethnic
story that transcends ethnicity." —Robert L. Pincus, San Diego
Union-Tribune
"[The Boat] takes the reader from the South China Sea to Medellin,
Colombia, to Tehran and beyond–places that, in many cases, Nam Le
has never visited. . . . What struck me about [‘Tehran Calling’]
was how vivid the imagery of the city of Tehran appears–the Shiite
Ashura procession, with the self-flagellation, the rutted roads,
[he] talks about the stale fluorescent writing at the airport . . .
[Nam Le] writes so convincingly about these places [he’s] never
been to . . ." —Guy Raz, correspondent, All Things
Considered
"Brilliant . . . The Boat will quicken your pulse and awaken every
nerve in your being. For avid readers who have hungered for stories
that can transport them physically, intellectually and emotionally,
stories so well-structured and narrated they appear to reinvent the
form itself, the literary American Idol is Nam Le. [His] dynamic
prose and remarkable range of subjects and points of view defy
explanation. . . . There is so much to say about Nam Le’s genius
that it would take a book and even that may not be enough. With The
Boat, he defeats time, hollowness and cliché with every story,
earning him the right to reap sheaves, buckets, reservoirs of
generous, unabashed praise." —Denise Gess, Raleigh News &
Observer
"Twenty-nine-year-old Nam Le demonstrates the aesthetic ambition
and sentence-making chops of a much more experienced writer. . . .
Each moment of technical brio [in the opening story] deepens the
dramatization of the all-but-unspeakable power of love between
parent and child. By the end, any perceptive reader will agree that
the ‘world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a
single syllable.’ . . . The plot unfolds with remorseless logic,
harsh beauty, and an almost unbearable tenderness that reminded me
of Dubliners. [The story’s] scenes [are] exact in their details and
gorgeous in their musicality . . . I’ve been telling friends about
The Boat for weeks now, saying ‘This guy’s got it.’ Now I’m telling
you. Pass it on." —John Repp, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Astonishing . . . Not yet 30, Le effortlessly gives all seven
tales in The Boat a different register, structure, vocabulary and
tone.. . . . The miracle of these stories is how their author, by
sleight of hand and virtue of skill, puts his searching, observant
voice wherever he likes." —John Freeman, Newark
Star-Ledger
"Moving . . . The opening story in Nam Le’s debut collection, The
Boat, is as dazzling an introduction to a writer’s work as I’ve
read. . . . Nam Le digs beneath the surface and unfailingly sees
the bundles as human in these accomplished stories about the
terrible reverberations of violence." —Heller McAlpin, The
Christian Science Monitor
"It is uncommon that a writer’s first book can be described as
masterful, especially when the author is not yet 30 years old. But
The Boat, an extraordinary collection of seven short stories by Nam
Le, is truly that kind of book. . . . As complex in its depth as it
is accessible in its prose. . . . These stories are so beautifully
written and cross emotional barriers of time and place with such
clear vision and strong command of language we can only wonder with
awe what Nam Le will offer us next." —Jim Carmin, The
Oregonian"[The stories in Nam Le’s The Boat] flout the traditional
maxim ‘Write what you know,’ taking on characters as diverse as
Colombian drug lords, Iranian feminists, and a New York painter who
sounds a lot like Lucian Freud. All sincere works of the
imagination, these stories yet bear a self-conscious riposte to
conventional wisdom. . . . Mr. Le stands out from the crowd [of
debut writers] because of the breadth of his research and the
confidence of his imagination. He may prize the universal, but he
doesn’t skimp on concrete detail. In ‘Tehran Calling,’ for example,
he could have described the row between an American visitor and her
Iranian friend with dialogue and a few descriptions, but instead he
takes us walking on the streets, describes smells, effects of
lighting, and the fine points of street wear. . . . I found
‘Hiroshima,’ the most experimental story here, also to be one of
the most absorbing. . . . There are many ticklish questions to ask
about fiction and its sources, and they have been asked, recently,
by many writers. Mr. Le’s distinction is to ask them without once
seeming other than a hardworking practitioner of quality American
lit." —Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun
"Leering. Sepia-toned. Dark. Dark. Dark. Light. Well-crafted.
Intricately cut, sanded, steamed and stained. Striking.
Aggressively schizophrenic. Crayola-esque (characters). Jim
Shepard-esque (range)." —Esquire (All-Adjective
Reviews)"Sensational . . . There is something thrilling in
discovering a gifted new writer on the American scene. And that is
what we have in Nam Le, whose short story collection, The Boat,
easily will be among the significant works of fiction published
this year. . . . Stories that both crackle with immediacy and sport
a cool, focused tone. His characters are drawn with an old master’s
depth . . . It’s not often that a work of highbrow fiction moves
like a suspense novel, but that’s the kind of talent Nam Le
displays. It reaffirms your faith in literature. . . . There is a
spare architecture to his sentences, yet he has the ability to
create complex worlds, shadowed by bleakness and heartbreak. . . .
His first story alternates between playful satire and dread
seriousness, showing the kind of balancing act Le can pull off.
[In] ‘Cartagena,’ Le vividly sketches the cardboard cities and
muddy streets of Medellin . . . The story has the hypnotic power of
a Graham Greene nightmare. . . . The book’s masterpiece is
‘Halflead Bay,’ an Aussie twist on Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories.
. . . It is full of rich description, an ear for native lingo and
keen observations of dysfunctional family dynamics. As you read the
last lines of The Boat, it is not a stretch to flash on ‘The Dead,’
the legendary final story in Joyce’s Dubliners. . . . A book filled
with grace, texture and humanity." —Larry Aydlette, The Palm
Beach Post
"The characters in Nam Le’s The Boat are impossible to pigeonhole,
ranging from an egomaniacal Manhattan artist to a Colombian
gangster to a hard-drinking Iowa M.F.A. student. [The] standout
[is] the brutal title story [which] dramatizes the plight of three
Vietnamese boat people. Le’s viscerally affecting writing and bold
imagination mark an exciting debut." —Jennifer Reese,
Entertainment Weekly "Stories [that] engulf you and transport
you to another time, another place–give you a window into someone
else’s soul almost deeper than if it were your own. . . . Long on
character, depth and emotion: you’d swear that [Nam Le] has lived
in every one of those stories [that make up The Boat]. When you
finish each one, you will feel as if you have read a novel, your
breathing will be heavy and your heart will be pounding as you
return from a deeply personal adventure that has, in some strange
way, become your own. . . . The thread tying the stories together
in The Boat is the dramatic humanity, the poetic language, and most
of all, the idea that that depth and intensity of human emotion is
expressed on every continent. We are not so different after
all." —Faye Levow, Portsmouth Herald News"Four stars . . . The
stories [in The Boat] connect across country, class and
circumstance–not only through Le’s ambition to nail each milieu,
but through his obsession with the ways people live in and reveal
their cultures . . . Each story immerses readers in its own distant
setting. The book’s success isn’t just a matter of scene-setting;
it also depends on Le’s characters and his classic,
coincidences-explained-later plotting. He’ll make you marvel at the
web his South American hit men are caught in, and he’ll make you
worry for them. . . . In a piece about an Iranian activist and the
clueless white friend who comes to visit her, he writes the part of
the American interloper with sympathy and aplomb. . . . Le offers
real insight." —Sophie Fels, Time Out New York"Seven stories
set around the globe–from Iowa to Tehran, Manhattan to Australia,
and Colombia to Hiroshima–make up Vietnam-born Nam Le’s dynamic
debut collection, The Boat, in which achingly familiar alliances
converge in ingeniously unlikely places." —Lisa Shea,
Elle"Wide-ranging, knife-sharp stories by a masterly 29-year-old.
Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, yet his debut
collection of stories, The Boat, reveals as mature and certain an
American voice as just about any native-born writer twice his age.
His prose evokes Philip Roth’s–sure of itself, clean, and invisibly
effective. These muscular and psychologically rich narratives take
place in the United States, Australia, Colombia, and in a
storm-tossed boat in the South China Sea [and] contend with a
startlingly wide array of characters . . . What’s notable is the
structural soundness of these powerful and far-ranging pieces: Each
one is built to exactly the shape, and flows in exactly the tone
and language, that will suit the needs of the story. The final and
longest story in the book, ‘The Boat,’ takes on the deepest issues
of life, love, and death, something worthy of Conrad or James. Nam
Le is a remarkably sophisticated new writer." —Vince Passaro,
O, The Oprah Magazine"Stories rooted in war and history [that]
frequently zoom in on the affairs of characters who have to live
with the consequences. . . . Le uses his wonderfully flexible prose
style to explore Vietnamese ethnic identity, writing workshops, and
even plain old drunkenness." —Colin Marshall, The Santa
Barbara Independent"Stories [that] are reflective of their writer:
eclectic, diverse, true in their toughness and giving in their
complexity. . . . Two gems [are] ‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride
and Compassion and Sacrifice,’ [which] is art at its highest form,
incorporating satire, metafiction, homage, and social critique into
a story about a writer and his father and the infamous My Lai
Massacre, [and] the title story ‘The Boat’ [which] is filled with
so much emotional truth, it borders the line with non-fiction. . .
. It turned a tale into an experience and brought us that much
closer to one another." —Ky-Phong Tran, Nguoi Viet Daily
News"[Nam Le’s] personal history is as compelling and engrossing as
any of his writing. . . . A debut collection of seven taut,
geographically diverse stories . . . Le could be the next big thing
[and] the opening story, ‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and
Compassion and Sacrifice,’ goes a good distance to proving
it." —Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News"So engaging, so
unequivocally well done, [The Boat] is sure to appeal to any fan of
good writing. From the opening tale, it’s hard not to be giddy.
[‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’]
is a brilliantly self-conscious and humorous slice of the writing
life, which doubles as a poignant story about fathers and sons and
family tragedies. . . . Things only get better from there. Nam Le
is a chameleon of voices and points of view, leading the reader
through the experiences of an older man, a disillusioned young
woman, a boy on the cusp of adulthood, and a teenage girl. The Boat
takes us all over the world with fantastic verisimilitude. . . .
‘Halflead Bay’ is an enviable achievement–an adolescent’s battle to
find courage as his life begins to turn upside down, the story
developed with perfect suspense. . . . And the title story offers
urgency, poignancy and heartbreaking tragedy. As if the stories
themselves weren’t enough to make The Boat a worthy summer read,
the skill of the author is a spectacle to behold. He manages to
avoid so many pitfalls. He doesn’t shy away from stark and
disturbing images, for example, yet he doesn’t rely on the
grotesque to create effective writing. The reader can sense his
personal investment in the work, but the stories aren’t even close
to self-indulgent. It’s enough to give a person a literary crush.
Each story is dark and deep, exquisitely constructed and
beautifully told. Nam Le is a studied, competent and graceful
writer, and The Boat is both a contemporary treasure and a
harbinger of good things to come." —Jessica Inman,
BookPage"The protagonist of the first story in this stellar debut
collection is the Vietnam-born Nam, a former lawyer from Australia
trying to meet a deadline at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when his
estranged father blows into town. Will this [collection] be a bunch
of autobiographical stories exemplifying ‘ethnic fiction’ (which
the story actually managed, rather slyly, to dismiss)? Absolutely
not–unless Le is also a 14-year-old assassin in Colombia, asked to
kill a friend; a crotchety if successful painter coming to terms
with a cancer diagnosis just as the daughter he’s never met
prepares for her Carnegie Hall debut; a high school boy in
Australia who’s achieved a modest sports victory and must face down
a bully as his mother faces death; and an American woman visiting a
friend in Tehran who risks her life battling the regime. Le writes
rawly rigorous stories that capture entire worlds; each character
is distinctive and fully fleshed out, each plot eventful as a
full-length novel but artfully compressed. Highly
recommended." —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal"[The Boat is]
set on six continents and at sea, in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, [with] characters ranging in age from childhood through
the senior years. Many [of the stories] explore the intricate
loyalties and betrayals in family life: notably, ‘Love and Honor
and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,’ in which a
Vietnamese Australian émigré studying at the University of Iowa’s
writers’ program experiences his father’s final brutality, and
‘Halflead Bay,’ in which a teenage boy struggles with the father
and brother who rescue him from a vicious schoolmate. [The
characters] are brought to life in powerful stories of love and
death through a muscular yet delicate style: lyrical, often poetic,
leaving the obvious unsaid and endings ambiguous. Readers will
devour this book." —Ellen Loughran, Booklist"A breathtakingly
assured collection of stories–powerful, moving, unsparingly
honest–exhibiting a narrative confidence and range that is as
remarkable as it is mature. A tremendous debut." —William
Boyd, author of Any Human Heart"From a Colombian slum to the
streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with
very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le’s
accomplished debut. . . . The opening [story] features a Vietnamese
character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer’s
Workshop master’s when his father comes for a tense visit . . . The
story’s ironies are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate
through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together,
the stories cover a vast geographic territory and are filled with
exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an
economical style as deft as it is sure." —Publishers Weekly
(starred review)"A polished and intense debut of astonishing range.
Some of the stories border on novellas, and this allows the author
more latitude to develop the complexity of his characters. The
opening story is a brilliantly conceived narrative about a writer
called Nam . . . When his father, a Vietnamese immigrant interrupts
both Nam’s schedule and his personal life, Nam begins to fret, for
he’s worried about being able to produce a story on the tight
deadline he faces. He’s not interested in falling back on the
‘typical’ survival story about Vietnamese boat people, and he
remembers that at an earlier time his father confessed to having
witnessed the My Lai massacre as a boy of 14. This revelation leads
Nam to a stunning realization about the nature of father-son
relationships, and his epiphany becomes the true subject of his
story. . . Ironically, and slyly, with a nod to the opening story,
the final piece, which gives the book its name, is an imaginative
reconstruction for what it felt like to be a boat person, to launch
into a 12-day journey with no foreseeable end. Consummately
self-assured." —Kirkus Reviews"Stellar . . . The unusually
various characters in Nam Le’s excellent debut collection live
between worlds. . . . The book’s seven stories are also diverse in
setting and mode. Consequently, the reader . . . becomes a
participant in Le’s transglobal examination of lives being lived in
mental and physical border zones. Le leaps from world to world
with the help of his unusually supple prose. It can shift over the
course of a page from intense, detailed understatement to the
workmanlike to the searingly eloquent. The textures of prose found
among the stories are equally distinct. . . . In The Boat’s opening
story, Le’s fictional alter ego . . . [is] drafting a story, much
like the one we are reading, that simultaneously enacts,
dismantles, and expands on the genre. The Boat manages to breathe
similarly fresh air into the overly familiar idea of the
short-story collection. The result is bracing." —Laird Hunt,
Bookforum"From the very first page of The Boat, Nam Le’s
extraordinary talent, range of vision, and moral courage make the
reader sit up and take notice. By the last page, one feels a kind
of fervent gratitude–rare enough these days–for having been
introduced to a young writer whose mark on the literary world, so
freshly made, will only grow deeper in the years to
come." —John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and
Reservation Road"Nam Le writes with a rare blend of courage and
beauty. His prose has a stunning clarity that works perfectly
with the constant flow of narrative surprises. Book your
passage on The Boat. You will not forget the people you meet on the
voyage." —Chris Offutt, author of The Same River Twice"The
Boat is tremendous, challenging and ambitious, worthy of the same
shelf that holds Dubliners and The Things They Carried–like those
works, it asks to be read as a whole and taken seriously as a book.
In it, storms gather but no one seems able to respond; violence
leads to confusion instead of clarity; love provokes rather than
answers old questions, stirring up painful longings in numb and
broken souls. The book journeys across time and space, history and
continents, finding a nightmare of isolation, fear, upheaval and
violence. Nam Le looks into our present, and we seem to hear a
prophetic voice coming to us from the future, but really this book
nails our collective now, our kairos, with an urgency and relevance
that feels visionary." —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of The Dead
Fish Museum"In the first story of this fine collection, Nam Le
has already demonstrated the kind of courage and directness it
takes most writers years to achieve. By the last, he’s proven
he can take you on a journey to almost anywhere–the slums of
Colombia, the South Asian seas, the exurbs of Australia, or the art
world of New York–all in vivid and at times harrowing
detail. The Boat is an impressive feat, and the debut of a
very talented writer." —Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not a
Stranger Here"In these seven fierce, alluring stories, Nam
Le demonstrates, to an extraordinary degree, John Donne’s
claim that no man is an island. I was impressed and deeply
moved by the many worlds–Iowa City, war-torn Viet Nam, rural
Australia–to which this brilliant young writer transported
me. A terrific book." —Margot Livesey, author of Eva
Moves the Furniture
From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In "Halflead Bay," an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of "Meeting Elise," a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies--"You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing," says a fellow student to Nam--are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory (Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Australia) and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure. (May) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
"Nam Le's lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits
enormous visceral power. . . . A remarkable collection." -The
New York Times
"Nam Le is extraordinary, a writer who must - who will - be
heard. . . .The Boat's vision and its power are timeless."
-Mary Gaitskill
"Astounding. . . . A refreshingly diverse and panoramic debut."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated. . . .
Moving and unforgettable." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed
world . . . . Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten."
-Junot Diaz
"Lyrical . . . Powerful and assured. . . . [Le's] kaleidoscopic
world view is on display throughout the stories, which seamlessly
blend cultural traditions, accents and landscapes that run from
lush to barren." -The Miami Herald
"Stunning. . . .These stories are so beautifully written
and cross emotional barriers of time and place with such clear
vision and strong command of language we can only wonder with awe
what Nam Le will offer us next." -The Oregonian
"A collection that takes the reader across the globe. From
Iowa to Colombia to Australia and Iran, the characters in Le's
stories each shape the world around them. In each story, the
protagonists create a new atmosphere. . . .While Le is a writer who
seems to be interested in the issues of the world, he is also a
writer interested in the young. . . . Le does not downplay the
lives of his children as fiction often does when portraying younger
characters but presents them with a seriousness and intelligence
that is refreshing. . . . The Boat is an impressive debut
from a writer with a lot more to give. A writer to be remembered."
-Marion Frisby, The Denver Post
"Powerful . . . Lyrical . . . Devastating . . . A harsh and
masterful effort, each tale a clean shot through the heart, the aim
true. In seven stories covering six continents and an ocean, Le
delivers a powerful and assured vision that offers a clear look at
his impressive talents. . . . Le is the sort of writer who taps
directly into the vein of desperation and offers no shelter. He's
not for the faint of heart, but the reward for soldiering on in the
toughness of his world is the welcome recognition of a voice clear
and brave." -Amy Driscoll, The Miami Herald
"Captivating . . . An uncannily mature debut [that]
distills time, experience . . . There's a streak of the naturalist
in Nam Le that looks back to such writers as Emile Zola, Stephen
Crane and Theodore Dreiser. . . . It is a searing portrait of
survival, love and sacrifice, which seems revelatory and wise. It
is [Le's] ethnic story that transcends ethnicity." -Robert L.
Pincus, San Diego Union-Tribune
"[The Boat] takes the reader from the South China
Sea to Medellin, Colombia, to Tehran and beyond-places that, in
many cases, Nam Le has never visited. . . . What struck me about
['Tehran Calling'] was how vivid the imagery of the city of Tehran
appears-the Shiite Ashura procession, with the self-flagellation,
the rutted roads, [he] talks about the stale fluorescent writing at
the airport . . . [Nam Le] writes so convincingly about these
places [he's] never been to . . ." -Guy Raz, correspondent, All
Things Considered
"Brilliant . . . The Boat will quicken your pulse
and awaken every nerve in your being. For avid readers who have
hungered for stories that can transport them physically,
intellectually and emotionally, stories so well-structured and
narrated they appear to reinvent the form itself, the literary
American Idol is Nam Le. [His] dynamic prose and remarkable range
of subjects and points of view defy explanation. . . . There
is so much to say about Nam Le's genius that it would take a book
and even that may not be enough. With The Boat, he defeats
time, hollowness and cliche with every story, earning him the right
to reap sheaves, buckets, reservoirs of generous, unabashed
praise." -Denise Gess, Raleigh News &
Observer
"Twenty-nine-year-old Nam Le demonstrates the
aesthetic ambition and sentence-making chops of a much more
experienced writer. . . . Each moment of technical brio [in the
opening story] deepens the dramatization of the all-but-unspeakable
power of love between parent and child. By the end, any perceptive
reader will agree that the 'world could be shattered by a small
stone dropped like a single syllable.' . . . The plot unfolds with
remorseless logic, harsh beauty, and an almost unbearable
tenderness that reminded me of Dubliners. [The story's]
scenes [are] exact in their details and gorgeous in their
musicality . . . I've been telling friends about The Boat
for weeks now, saying 'This guy's got it.' Now I'm telling you.
Pass it on." -John Repp, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Astonishing . . . Not yet 30, Le effortlessly gives all
seven tales in The Boat a different register, structure,
vocabulary and tone.. . . . The miracle of these stories is how
their author, by sleight of hand and virtue of skill, puts his
searching, observant voice wherever he likes." -John Freeman,
Newark Star-Ledger
"Moving . . . The opening story in Nam Le's debut
collection, The Boat, is as dazzling an introduction to a
writer's work as I've read. . . . Nam Le digs beneath the surface
and unfailingly sees the bundles as human in these accomplished
stories about the terrible reverberations of violence." -Heller
McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor
"It is uncommon that a writer's first book can be described
as masterful, especially when the author is not yet 30 years old.
But The Boat, an extraordinary collection of seven short
stories by Nam Le, is truly that kind of book. . . . As complex in
its depth as it is accessible in its prose. . . . These stories are
so beautifully written and cross emotional barriers of time and
place with such clear vision and strong command of language we can
only wonder with awe what Nam Le will offer us next." -Jim Carmin,
The Oregonian"[The stories in Nam Le's The Boat] flout the
traditional maxim 'Write what you know,' taking on characters as
diverse as Colombian drug lords, Iranian feminists, and a New York
painter who sounds a lot like Lucian Freud. All sincere works of
the imagination, these stories yet bear a self-conscious riposte to
conventional wisdom. . . . Mr. Le stands out from the crowd [of
debut writers] because of the breadth of his research and the
confidence of his imagination. He may prize the universal, but he
doesn't skimp on concrete detail. In 'Tehran Calling,' for example,
he could have described the row between an American visitor and her
Iranian friend with dialogue and a few descriptions, but instead he
takes us walking on the streets, describes smells, effects of
lighting, and the fine points of street wear. . . . I found
'Hiroshima,' the most experimental story here, also to be one of
the most absorbing. . . . There are many ticklish questions to ask
about fiction and its sources, and they have been asked, recently,
by many writers. Mr. Le's distinction is to ask them without once
seeming other than a hardworking practitioner of quality American
lit." -Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun
"Leering. Sepia-toned. Dark. Dark. Dark. Light. Well-crafted.
Intricately cut, sanded, steamed and stained. Striking.
Aggressively schizophrenic. Crayola-esque (characters). Jim
Shepard-esque (range)." -Esquire (All-Adjective
Reviews)"Sensational . . . There is something thrilling in
discovering a gifted new writer on the American scene. And that is
what we have in Nam Le, whose short story collection, The Boat,
easily will be among the significant works of fiction published
this year. . . . Stories that both crackle with immediacy and sport
a cool, focused tone. His characters are drawn with an old master's
depth . . . It's not often that a work of highbrow fiction moves
like a suspense novel, but that's the kind of talent Nam Le
displays. It reaffirms your faith in literature. . . . There is a
spare architecture to his sentences, yet he has the ability to
create complex worlds, shadowed by bleakness and heartbreak. . . .
His first story alternates between playful satire and dread
seriousness, showing the kind of balancing act Le can pull off.
[In] 'Cartagena,' Le vividly sketches the cardboard cities and
muddy streets of Medellin . . . The story has the hypnotic power of
a Graham Greene nightmare. . . . The book's masterpiece is
'Halflead Bay,' an Aussie twist on Hemingway's Nick Adams stories.
. . . It is full of rich description, an ear for native lingo and
keen observations of dysfunctional family dynamics. As you read the
last lines of The Boat, it is not a stretch to flash on 'The Dead,'
the legendary final story in Joyce's Dubliners. . . . A book filled
with grace, texture and humanity." -Larry Aydlette, The Palm Beach
Post
"The characters in Nam Le's The Boat are impossible to pigeonhole,
ranging from an egomaniacal Manhattan artist to a Colombian
gangster to a hard-drinking Iowa M.F.A. student. [The] standout
[is] the brutal title story [which] dramatizes the plight of three
Vietnamese boat people. Le's viscerally affecting writing and bold
imagination mark an exciting debut." -Jennifer Reese, Entertainment
Weekly "Stories [that] engulf you and transport you to another
time, another place-give you a window into someone else's soul
almost deeper than if it were your own. . . . Long on character,
depth and emotion: you'd swear that [Nam Le] has lived in every one
of those stories [that make up The Boat]. When you finish each one,
you will feel as if you have read a novel, your breathing will be
heavy and your heart will be pounding as you return from a deeply
personal adventure that has, in some strange way, become your own.
. . . The thread tying the stories together in The Boat is the
dramatic humanity, the poetic language, and most of all, the idea
that that depth and intensity of human emotion is expressed on
every continent. We are not so different after all." -Faye Levow,
Portsmouth Herald News"Four stars . . . The stories [in The Boat]
connect across country, class and circumstance-not only through
Le's ambition to nail each milieu, but through his obsession with
the ways people live in and reveal their cultures . . . Each story
immerses readers in its own distant setting. The book's success
isn't just a matter of scene-setting; it also depends on Le's
characters and his classic, coincidences-explained-later plotting.
He'll make you marvel at the web his South American hit men are
caught in, and he'll make you worry for them. . . . In a piece
about an Iranian activist and the clueless white friend who comes
to visit her, he writes the part of the American interloper with
sympathy and aplomb. . . . Le offers real insight." -Sophie Fels,
Time Out New York"Seven stories set around the globe-from Iowa to
Tehran, Manhattan to Australia, and Colombia to Hiroshima-make up
Vietnam-born Nam Le's dynamic debut collection, The Boat, in which
achingly familiar alliances converge in ingeniously unlikely
places." -Lisa Shea, Elle"Wide-ranging, knife-sharp stories by a
masterly 29-year-old. Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in
Australia, yet his debut collection of stories, The Boat, reveals
as mature and certain an American voice as just about any
native-born writer twice his age. His prose evokes Philip
Roth's-sure of itself, clean, and invisibly effective. These
muscular and psychologically rich narratives take place in the
United States, Australia, Colombia, and in a storm-tossed boat in
the South China Sea [and] contend with a startlingly wide array of
characters . . . What's notable is the structural soundness of
these powerful and far-ranging pieces: Each one is built to exactly
the shape, and flows in exactly the tone and language, that will
suit the needs of the story. The final and longest story in the
book, 'The Boat,' takes on the deepest issues of life, love, and
death, something worthy of Conrad or James. Nam Le is a remarkably
sophisticated new writer." -Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah
Magazine"Stories rooted in war and history [that] frequently zoom
in on the affairs of characters who have to live with the
consequences. . . . Le uses his wonderfully flexible prose style to
explore Vietnamese ethnic identity, writing workshops, and even
plain old drunkenness." -Colin Marshall, The Santa Barbara
Independent"Stories [that] are reflective of their writer:
eclectic, diverse, true in their toughness and giving in their
complexity. . . . Two gems [are] 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride
and Compassion and Sacrifice,' [which] is art at its highest form,
incorporating satire, metafiction, homage, and social critique into
a story about a writer and his father and the infamous My Lai
Massacre, [and] the title story 'The Boat' [which] is filled with
so much emotional truth, it borders the line with non-fiction. . .
. It turned a tale into an experience and brought us that much
closer to one another." -Ky-Phong Tran, Nguoi Viet Daily News"[Nam
Le's] personal history is as compelling and engrossing as any of
his writing. . . . A debut collection of seven taut, geographically
diverse stories . . . Le could be the next big thing [and] the
opening story, 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion
and Sacrifice,' goes a good distance to proving it." -Robert
Birnbaum, The Morning News"So engaging, so unequivocally well done,
[The Boat] is sure to appeal to any fan of good writing. From the
opening tale, it's hard not to be giddy. ['Love and Honor and Pity
and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice'] is a brilliantly
self-conscious and humorous slice of the writing life, which
doubles as a poignant story about fathers and sons and family
tragedies. . . . Things only get better from there. Nam Le is a
chameleon of voices and points of view, leading the reader through
the experiences of an older man, a disillusioned young woman, a boy
on the cusp of adulthood, and a teenage girl. The Boat takes us all
over the world with fantastic verisimilitude. . . . 'Halflead Bay'
is an enviable achievement-an adolescent's battle to find courage
as his life begins to turn upside down, the story developed with
perfect suspense. . . . And the title story offers urgency,
poignancy and heartbreaking tragedy. As if the stories themselves
weren't enough to make The Boat a worthy summer read, the skill of
the author is a spectacle to behold. He manages to avoid so many
pitfalls. He doesn't shy away from stark and disturbing images, for
example, yet he doesn't rely on the grotesque to create effective
writing. The reader can sense his personal investment in the work,
but the stories aren't even close to self-indulgent. It's enough to
give a person a literary crush. Each story is dark and deep,
exquisitely constructed and beautifully told. Nam Le is a studied,
competent and graceful writer, and The Boat is both a contemporary
treasure and a harbinger of good things to come." -Jessica Inman,
BookPage"The protagonist of the first story in this stellar debut
collection is the Vietnam-born Nam, a former lawyer from Australia
trying to meet a deadline at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when his
estranged father blows into town. Will this [collection] be a bunch
of autobiographical stories exemplifying 'ethnic fiction' (which
the story actually managed, rather slyly, to dismiss)? Absolutely
not-unless Le is also a 14-year-old assassin in Colombia, asked to
kill a friend; a crotchety if successful painter coming to terms
with a cancer diagnosis just as the daughter he's never met
prepares for her Carnegie Hall debut; a high school boy in
Australia who's achieved a modest sports victory and must face down
a bully as his mother faces death; and an American woman visiting a
friend in Tehran who risks her life battling the regime. Le writes
rawly rigorous stories that capture entire worlds; each character
is distinctive and fully fleshed out, each plot eventful as a
full-length novel but artfully compressed. Highly recommended."
-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal"[The Boat is] set on six
continents and at sea, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
[with] characters ranging in age from childhood through the senior
years. Many [of the stories] explore the intricate loyalties and
betrayals in family life: notably, 'Love and Honor and Pity and
Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,' in which a Vietnamese
Australian emigre studying at the University of Iowa's writers'
program experiences his father's final brutality, and 'Halflead
Bay,' in which a teenage boy struggles with the father and brother
who rescue him from a vicious schoolmate. [The characters] are
brought to life in powerful stories of love and death through a
muscular yet delicate style: lyrical, often poetic, leaving the
obvious unsaid and endings ambiguous. Readers will devour this
book." -Ellen Loughran, Booklist"A breathtakingly assured
collection of stories-powerful, moving, unsparingly
honest-exhibiting a narrative confidence and range that is as
remarkable as it is mature. A tremendous debut." -William Boyd,
author of Any Human Heart"From a Colombian slum to the streets of
Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very
particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's
accomplished debut. . . . The opening [story] features a Vietnamese
character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's
Workshop master's when his father comes for a tense visit . . . The
story's ironies are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate
through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together,
the stories cover a vast geographic territory and are filled with
exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an
economical style as deft as it is sure." -Publishers Weekly
(starred review)"A polished and intense debut of astonishing range.
Some of the stories border on novellas, and this allows the author
more latitude to develop the complexity of his characters. The
opening story is a brilliantly conceived narrative about a writer
called Nam . . . When his father, a Vietnamese immigrant interrupts
both Nam's schedule and his personal life, Nam begins to fret, for
he's worried about being able to produce a story on the tight
deadline he faces. He's not interested in falling back on the
'typical' survival story about Vietnamese boat people, and he
remembers that at an earlier time his father confessed to having
witnessed the My Lai massacre as a boy of 14. This revelation leads
Nam to a stunning realization about the nature of father-son
relationships, and his epiphany becomes the true subject of his
story. . . Ironically, and slyly, with a nod to the opening story,
the final piece, which gives the book its name, is an imaginative
reconstruction for what it felt like to be a boat person, to launch
into a 12-day journey with no foreseeable end. Consummately
self-assured." -Kirkus Reviews"Stellar . . . The unusually various
characters in Nam Le's excellent debut collection live between
worlds. . . . The book's seven stories are also diverse in setting
and mode. Consequently, the reader . . . becomes a participant in
Le's transglobal examination of lives being lived in mental and
physical border zones. Le leaps from world to world with the help
of his unusually supple prose. It can shift over the course of a
page from intense, detailed understatement to the workmanlike to
the searingly eloquent. The textures of prose found among the
stories are equally distinct. . . . In The Boat's opening story,
Le's fictional alter ego . . . [is] drafting a story, much like the
one we are reading, that simultaneously enacts, dismantles, and
expands on the genre. The Boat manages to breathe similarly fresh
air into the overly familiar idea of the short-story collection.
The result is bracing." -Laird Hunt, Bookforum"From the very first
page of The Boat, Nam Le's extraordinary talent, range of vision,
and moral courage make the reader sit up and take notice. By the
last page, one feels a kind of fervent gratitude-rare enough these
days-for having been introduced to a young writer whose mark on the
literary world, so freshly made, will only grow deeper in the years
to come." -John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and
Reservation Road"Nam Le writes with a rare blend of courage and
beauty. His prose has a stunning clarity that works perfectly with
the constant flow of narrative surprises. Book your passage on The
Boat. You will not forget the people you meet on the voyage."
-Chris Offutt, author of The Same River Twice"The Boat is
tremendous, challenging and ambitious, worthy of the same shelf
that holds Dubliners and The Things They Carried-like those works,
it asks to be read as a whole and taken seriously as a book. In it,
storms gather but no one seems able to respond; violence leads to
confusion instead of clarity; love provokes rather than answers old
questions, stirring up painful longings in numb and broken souls.
The book journeys across time and space, history and continents,
finding a nightmare of isolation, fear, upheaval and violence. Nam
Le looks into our present, and we seem to hear a prophetic voice
coming to us from the future, but really this book nails our
collective now, our kairos, with an urgency and relevance that
feels visionary." -Charles D'Ambrosio, author of The Dead Fish
Museum"In the first story of this fine collection, Nam Le has
already demonstrated the kind of courage and directness it takes
most writers years to achieve. By the last, he's proven he can take
you on a journey to almost anywhere-the slums of Colombia, the
South Asian seas, the exurbs of Australia, or the art world of New
York-all in vivid and at times harrowing detail. The Boat is an
impressive feat, and the debut of a very talented writer." -Adam
Haslett, author of You Are Not a Stranger Here"In these seven
fierce, alluring stories, Nam Le demonstrates, to an extraordinary
degree, John Donne's claim that no man is an island. I was
impressed and deeply moved by the many worlds-Iowa City, war-torn
Viet Nam, rural Australia-to which this brilliant young writer
transported me. A terrific book." -Margot Livesey, author of Eva
Moves the Furniture
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