Presented here for the first time in English, the cult writer Charles Chahwan—"Lebanon's answer to Charles Bukowski"—tells a tale of rival militiamen euphoric with violence.   Under the gentle afternoon sunlight, Serge’s body appeared limp and more slouched than usual as he rested against the back seat of the shared taxi, a Morris Princess. He was the sole passenger in the service as it made its way down the coastal highway, as if other potential...

This selection of writings is by no means or intention a full and general picture of Vietnamese literature. The reading choice returns/moves toward the presences, the ruins, and the enduring silences of writers-in-between, the hyphenated writers, the writers who hide themselves, the writers of unshareable struggles. The past, the present of the past, the present. North, South, the North in South, the South in North. Inside and outside. Here and there. Vietnamese and English. The fallen and...

In Ariel Urquiza's short story, a young man is forced to deliver drugs on his mother's behalf, but after arriving at his clients' party, he finds little motive for celebration.   “What do you want?” Gabriel asked when he opened the door. “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Renata’s son.” “Wow, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten so big, you’re almost as tall as me. Come on in. It took you a while, I was just...

Marcin Wicha discovers that choosing the right urn for his father's ashes is a process fraught with nightmarish options that could wake even the dead. “Please choose an extension number or wait to be transferred to the front office,” and the voice of Louis Armstrong on the phone:                             And I think to myself,                    ...

The author remembers how his father asked for American cookies from the hospital bed, and how, after a tumor claimed his life, no one ate the oranges in the garden.     In memory of José João Serrano Peixoto   The day begins to stir and things around me begin to stir a little also. I open the shutters. The flowers in the vases lift themselves toward the slender light that bathes them. The light skims low over the earth, like a plague stretching...

In Mishka Lavigne’s play Haven, the famous writer Gabrielle Sauriol has died in a car accident on the Pacific coast. Her only survivor is her adult daughter, Elsie. In this scene, Elsie attends her mother's funeral.   ELSIE Funeral home. I’m in mourning. That’s what one says, right? That’s what one says. My sincere condolences. Thank you. My most sincere condolences. Thank you. All my sympathy. Thank you. Condooooolences. Thank youuuuu. Sincere . ....

In a sleepless night, an old man remembers how he and his wife have spent a lifetime speaking the language of feet.   One sleepless night typical of the old and insomniac, Mr. Thuyết suddenly remembers the eyes of his daughter when she was three or four years old. For decades, he has kept that evening in near-complete oblivion without once recalling the eyes of the child who was always attached to him, the eyes of the child who would lie with her head in his arms,...

In the US, Thanksgiving is this month’s major holiday, but for others November opens with the second and third days of the celebration known collectively as the Day of the Dead. Those days—Halloween, All Saints’ Day (that much-missed, exquisitely timed holiday for Catholic trick-or-treaters), and All Souls’ Day—prompt our consideration of the departed, as well as contemplation of our own mortality. We’re marking the holiday with writing that explores...

A Different Context I first came to know another side of Vietnamese poetry, outside of the formal education system, through “virtual encounters” and friends in distant places, writers and works on internet forums like Talawas, Tiền Vệ, Evan, Gió-O, Hợp Lưu, Tạp Chí Thơ, and overseas Vietnamese publications passed from hand to hand between friends inside the country. The circulation of these publications over many years even now...

A piece of furniture in an unusual location sparks a series of interrogations.      a velvet chair             standing by itself                         on a highway a chair standing by itself on a highway             means its life is over a life of ups and downs             before it was...

A Vietnamese woman visiting her ex-husband's family in Denmark remembers the many men she's loved in her life.    At fourteen I fell in love with a man, a writer, older than me by thirteen years, already with a family. He resembled a young Anthony Perkins, that guitar-playing wanderer who roams the forest and happens upon the doe eyes of Audrey Hepburn in the foliage. At twenty-one I lost my virgin body to a person who specialized in the old lục bát...

What begins as a meditation on love soon meanders past a lighthouse, past an ox with broken horns, until it reaches consciousness.    1 Love I liberate the captive herd within me I summon back the fossilized kisses 2 If things have souls then things bear static souls 3 Hungry birds are building nests in space Affliction gathers in the handkerchief of a bride on her wedding day 4 We kidnap fear by the sharp-edged tongue of a knife 5 The sound of your crying purifies the...

Trần Dần’s novel, Crossroads and Lampposts, is set in Hanoi in late 1954 and 1955, immediately following the withdrawal of the French and the takeover by the Viet Minh under the terms of the Geneva Accords. Duong, the main character in the novel, is under suspicion of being a collaborator with the former French regime. In this excerpt from chapter three, Trinh (aka Com), Duong’s wife, talks about life under the new regime and her husband’s state of mind....

These translated, cut-up and reassembled Vietnamese texts are by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên, originals by Nguyễn Quốc Chánh (“Syndrome,” “Fucking Skulls Open”), Bùi Giáng (“Sương Tỳ Hải”), and Nhã Thuyên (“taste of waters”).   birds one by one penetrates a gap, disappearing wings disappearing songs, beaks remain, cut open one another’s eyes, napes, death...

In this surrealistic piece, a sleeping man wakes up to find a visitor watching him.    He comes to find me on a day I don’t remember, by the time I’ve gotten up he is already sitting on the other side of the table to watch as I eat my breakfast. He does not say a word as I stir the coffee, the spoon’s collision with the side of the glass making a dispassionate clang. I’ve been sleeping for a while, not sure how long a while, he must have arrived as I...

A popular image of Mongolia is that of clear blue skies, wide open steppe, and nomads on horseback. Conversely, Mongolia has recently garnered international attention as a site of rapid urbanization and high air pollution. These images, though both true to some degree, are incomplete. The reality for many people in the country is less starkly divided. People move through and across rural and urban spaces frequently throughout their lives, engaging in both settled and nomadic modes of...

Dalit literature has emerged as an integral part of a larger political movement that offers substantive and detailed protest against the entrenched system of untouchability, or the socially institutionalized system of caste-based hierarchy and discrimination, in contemporary India. It traces its modern history to the early 1970s with the foundation of a literary-activist collective called the Dalit Panthers, whose members wrote primarily in Marathi—the language of Maharashtra, the...

A frustrated wife and mother finds life in a fishbowl instructive in this story translated from the Mongolian.   I've been in here for exactly one year. My once fair and delicate skin, the envy of all the other ladies, has hardened into scales mottled with red and pink splotches. A year, exactly one year. People have thought that I have been a fish for exactly one year. Regardless of what other people say, what really matters to me is that three hundred and sixty-five...

After years of abuse at the hands of their higher-caste neighbors, a Dalit community takes action and finds sweet revenge.   Definitions of Hindi words may be found in the glossary.   A haze of shock and terror swam before the eyes of everyone in the village. Women began to shriek. A look of outrage welled up in some pairs of eyes. Jaws clenched in anger. Even those whose elderly eyes had gone dark felt something untoward had happened. The village erupted in...

Erdene Seng's short story reveals the fate of one stubborn member of a community in transition.   Our people began to move from our homeland at the beginning of spring. Old man Dash would remember that day for the rest of his life. Dash sat by the pile of firewood near his ger. He watched as, almost like a spring mirage, a mass of animals and carts moved haphazardly along the near side of the southern mountain, with horsemen galloping in all directions. Dash saw this and...