Nam Le - Böcker

In this dazzling collection, Nam Le takes us across the globe as he enters the hearts and minds of characters from all over the world. Whether it's the story of fourteen-year-old Juan, a hit man in Colombia; an ageing painter in New York mourning the death of his much-younger lover; or a young refugee fleeing Vietnam, crammed in the ship's hold with two hundred others, the result is unexpectedly moving and powerful. This is an extraordinary work of fiction that takes us to the heart of what it means to be human.

An explosive, devastating debut poetry book from the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity - and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression and historical trauma.But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one's home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence - for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this - of language itself.Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le's poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.