Monique Truong – författare

In a compelling novel that takes the reader on a strange journey from Indochina to Paris, the Vietnamese cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas reveals his own fascinating story-Paris, 1934. Binh has accompanied his employers to the station for their departure to America. His own destination is unclear: will he go with his 'Mesdames', stay in France, or return to his native Vietnam? Binh fled his homeland in disgrace, leaving behind his malevolent charlatan of a father and his self-sacrificing mother. For five years, he has been the personal cook at the famous apartment on the rue de Fleurs. Binh is a lost soul, an exile and an alien, a man of musings, memories and possibly lies- Tastes, oceans, sweat, tears - The Book of Salt is a an inspired novel about food and exile, love and betrayal.

Growing up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the '70s and '80s, Linda Hammerick knows that she is different. She has strong, almost paralysing associations between words and tastes; she doesn't look like everyone else; and she isn't popular at school. She finds her way through life with the help of her great uncle 'Baby' Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend fat-thin-fat Kelly with whom she has been exchanging letters since they were seven. But then a tragedy and a revelation will make her question everything she thought she knew about herself and her family.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is proud to release a newly updated version of Watermark, the seminal anthology of Vietnamese American literature. Contextualized by a new foreword from Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and seasoned with new voices, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition takes its place as a generational work of eclectic and essential voices.Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, this updated edition of Watermark continues to elevate Vietnamese American literature, whose renaissance it ushered in upon its first publication. Again, some of the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers, such as Linh Dinh, Andrew Lam, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Dao Strom, explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on war. New voices such as Anvi Hoàng, Vinh Nguyen, and Vi Khi Nao are included in this new edition, raising the number of pieces from forty to fifty-two.Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works to reset the boundaries for themselves. And they do—using poetry, fiction, and experimental forms to venture further into the fringes of the Vietnamese American psyche. A work equal measures foundational and pathbreaking, now available again for a new generation of readers—an essential collection not to be missed.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is proud to release a newly updated version of Watermark, the seminal anthology of Vietnamese American literature. Contextualized by a new foreword from Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and seasoned with new voices, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition takes its place as a generational work of eclectic and essential voices. Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, this updated edition of Watermark continues to elevate Vietnamese American literature, whose renaissance it ushered in upon its first publication. Again, some of the most innovative contemporary Vietnamese American writers, such as Linh Dinh, Andrew Lam, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Dao Strom, explore thematic and stylistic territory previously overlooked in other collections, which have traditionally focused on war. New voices such as Anvi Hoàng, Vinh Nguyen, and Vi Khi Nao are included in this new edition, raising the number of pieces from forty to fifty-two.Watermark lifts all constraints, leaving the works to reset the boundaries for themselves. And they do—using poetry, fiction, and experimental forms to venture further into the fringes of the Vietnamese American psyche. A work equal measures foundational and pathbreaking, now available again and expanded for a new generation of readers—an essential collection not to be missed.

With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, The Sweetest Fruits illuminates the women’s tenacity and their struggles in this novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and belonging.Monique Truong gives voice to three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, who each tell the story of their life with Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), a globetrotting Greek-Irish writer best known as the author of America’s first Creole cookbook and for his many volumes about the folklore and ghost stories of Meiji Era Japan. An immigrant thrice over, Hearn is now remembered at best as a keen cultural observer and at worst as a purveyor of exotica.In their own unorthodox ways, the three women are also intrepid travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn’s remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each is a gifted storyteller with her own precise reason for sharing her story, and together their voices offer a revealing, often contradictory portrait of Hearn.‘It isn’t only the fantastic Lafcadio Hearn who springs to new life in these pages. The women around him do as well, even as they mix the extraordinary and the ordinary in an exhilarating new way. The Sweetest Fruits is brilliant and heartbreaking–I was transfixed.’ —Gish En, author of Typical American‘Presented in four courses from the perspective of the women closest to him, The Sweetest Fruits is a feast you’ll want to devour for its arresting metaphors and its beautiful prose.’ —Anita Lo, author of Solo: A Modern Cookbook for One‘Intimate and sensuous yet majestic in scope, The Sweetest Fruits is a rapturous, glorious novel, extraordinarily alive to the world.’ —Idra Novey, author Those Who Knew‘Monique Truong has composed a sublime, many-voiced novel of voyage and reinvention. It will cross horizons, yet remain burrowed in your heart.’ —Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena‘By giving readers a concert of voices, at last singing louder than Hearn’s biography and mythology, Truong asks us to ponder the ways those who are often ignored and marginalized might have their own rich, epic stories worth telling. In that sense, The Sweetest Fruits is a type of justice.’ —Eric Nguyen, author of Diacritics