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.

"Universal and personal."--Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior - "Will be read and studied for years to come."--Noël Alumit, author of Music Heard in Hi-Fi - "Maps the moveable feast of the Vietnamese diaspora."--Scott Lankford, author of Tahoe Beneath the Surface - "Lam's most lyrical and wide-ranging collection yet."--Matthew Spangler, playwright - "For anyone who has loved and lost a lover, a landscape, a home."--Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life - "Taste the desires of comedians, soldiers, tomboys, friends, queers, mothers, and refugees."--Long Bui, author of 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.

Andrew Lam fled Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975 when he was 11 years old. He attended the University of California, Berkeley studying biochemistry but abandoned plans for medical school after graduation. He entered the creative writing program at San Francisco State University instead. While still in school he began writing for Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He wrote for many newspapers and magazines since, including the National Geographic Traveler, the Los Angeles Times Magazine and The Nation. A regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered for over 7 years, Lam is the author of 3 books, and has won the Pen Open Book Award and The Josephine Miles Literary Award and many others. He served as a Journalism Fellow at Stanford 2001-02. In 2004 a PBS documentary about his life called "My Journey Home" in which a film crew followed him back to Vietnam was aired nationwide. Lam is working on a novel and a memoir about his childhood in Vietnam during the war. He has lectured at many universities and colleges and taught as a writer in residence at San Jose State University in 2015-2016. He lives in San Francisco.