Birds of Paradise Lost by Andrew Lam
*Finalist for the California Book Award* The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and 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 a 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.Andrew Lam is the author of East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres and Fragrant Dreams: Thoughts on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Prize. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New American Media, a network of over 2,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States. For many years, he was a regular commenter on NPR's All Things Considered, and he was the subject of the PBS documentary My Road Home, which aired in 2004. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among others, have published his writings. His short stories have been taught and anthologized all over the world.
Birds of Paradise Lost is his debut collection of short stories. He currently resides in San Francisco.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781597092685 |
| ISBN 10 | 1597092681 |
| Title | Birds of Paradise Lost |
| Author | Andrew Lam |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Red Hen Press |
| Year published | 2013-04-18 |
| Number of pages | 216 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |