Blood and soap : stories / Linh Dinh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dinh, Linh, 1963-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Vietnam--Social life and customs--Fiction.

Vietnam.

Manners and customs.

Vietnamese Americans--Fiction.

Vietnamese Americans.

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

v, 138 pages ; 18 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Seven Stories Press, [2004]

Summary:

Blood and Soap is a breakthrough collection of modern-day fables from a wildly inventive American writer whose fiction has been called "terse and edgy" (Booklist) and "vividly imagined" (Kirkus Reviews). Dinh's gift is for constructing, in the manner of Italo Calvino, simple narratives that quickly frame larger questions; with a poet's timing, the author builds his stories to the one or few concentrated sentences that brand them with unforgettable meaning. In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the universality of language. "Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest." In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his crime: "As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world." The collection crescendos in displays of raw creative power, as in "Eight Plots," a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic "!" Blood and Soap is an arresting collection from a writer on the vanguard of American fiction.

Contents:

Prisoner with a Dictionary 1

Our Northernmost Governor 5

"!" 9

The Town of the Hidden Coffin 19

Those Who Are No Longer with Us 25

Our Newlyweds 31

Eight Plots 39

One-Sentence Stories 41

Man Carrying Books 47

Viet Cong University 49

Elvis Phong Is Dead! 51

A Plane Ride 55

A Floating Community 59

Key Words 61

13 63

Food Conjuring 67

Food Conjuring II 71

$ 73

A Happy Couple 79

These Ants 81

A Moral Decision 83

Tiny Spaces 85

Murder or Suicide? 87

Losers 91

The Fire Escape 93

What's Showing? 99

Two Intellectuals 105

Stewart Crenshaw 111

An Idea of Home 121

Costa San Giorgio 123

The Self-Portraitist of Signa 124

Luisa Loves Her Husband 125

Parmigiano Cheese 129

A Worshipper of Beauty 131

A Moving Exhibition of Reptiles 133

Two Kings 135

My Grandfather the Exceptional 137.

ISBN:

1583226427

OCLC:

53950825