Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester

Award-winning author Khanh Ha is a ten-time Pushcart nominee. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, The Robert Watson Literary Prize, The Orison Anthology Award, The James Knudsen Prize, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, The EastOver Fiction Prize, The Blackwater Press Fiction Prize, The Gival Press Novel Award, The Red Hen Press Fiction Award, The Unleash Creatives Fiction Prize, and The Next Generation INDIE Book Award. Ha was born in Vietnam and is now living in New Jersey.

“Ha’s signature lyricism is evident, lending emotional depth to Khang’s intimate story of his 15-year ordeal, endured and shared by thousands of other prisoners.”—Library Journal "The narrative is infused with cultural and political insights that explore the factors that shape freedom and the lack thereof...Brother Khang’s story vividly conveys a profound sense of alienation born of a personal identity split by war. A compelling addition to the literature of the Vietnam War."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“In a novel written with so much painstaking detail, I felt the ghosts of the people and places of postwar Vietnam brought back to life, taking shape in my imagination as Ha’s finely wrought cast of prisoners, priests, and prison cadres, as the wives and children marooned in the violence. Reading such a work feels like more than reading; it feels like bearing witness.”—Megan Peck Shub, Necessary Fiction“Khanh Ha’s new novel, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester, is a tale of postwar Vietnamese labor camps that is both utterly harrowing and utterly necessary in these current parlous times. Through Ha’s arresting prose, we inhabit an inmate whose experience of great cruelty speaks not only of the past but resonates into the enduring dark complexities of the human soul. This is an important book from an important writer.”—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain“Ha is a writer of rare talent able to plumb the depth of the human heart in the smooth rhythm of a meandering river. For Ha, the setting plays the part of an ever-present character dictating the tone and mood of the stories. Ha’s work always put me in mind of Faulker in that it has a mythic quality that only the best writers are able to capture. At the same time, it is—at times brutally—realistic.”—John Gist, author of The Yewberry Way: Book I Prayer, Lizard Dreaming of Birds, and CrowHeart