Birds of Paradise Lost
Wed 08 Mar 2023, 05 pm – 07 pm
Sàn Art
Units B6.16 and B6.17, 6th Floor, Block B Office, Millennium Masteri
Ward 6, District 4, HCMC (enter via Nguyen Huu Hao street)
Registration link
From the organizer:
Sàn Art is pleased to host the reading session with Andrew Lam on his book, Birds of Paradise Lost (*).
(*)Finalist for the California Book Award
The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish, joy, and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past—memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity—is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with profound tragedy. Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.
* language: English
Artist Bio:
Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New American Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America. He was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among many others. He had a column with Huffington Post and Shanghai Daily, and his short stories have been widely taught and anthologized. Birds of Paradise Lost is his first story collection and it won the Josephine Miles literary award and a finalist for the California Book Award.
He spends his time between San Francisco and Saigon, Vietnam
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