Nam Le – författare

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators  A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection They call it an office job—being a sicario, a hit man—because the sicario is always waiting by the phone. In Medellín, Colombia, there’s always one more job to do. Juan Pablo Merendez is a young sicario just trying to get by, but when he’s summoned to meet his shadowy boss for the first time, all he wants is out—to Cartagena. “Cartagena” is a heart-pounding, urgent story of violence, unbreakable bonds, and tantalizing escape. From the collection The Boat, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award—Nam Le’s masterfully ambitious globe-hopping debut, heralding the arrival of a remarkable new author.  An eBook short.

‘[on reading Malouf for the first time] Here was a very-much-alive half-Lebanese (from provincial Brisbane, no less) producing English-language writing of the first order. And that in prose, not poetry. The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms, chorded its ideas, concentrated its images. Every other novel claims to be written in “poetic prose”; the real thing, when you come across it, is actually quite shocking.’ On David Malouf is unlike anything else written about one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers. Nam Le, author of international literary sensation The Boat, takes the reader on a thrilling intellectual ride in this sharp, bold essay. Its ambitious scope encompasses identity politics, metaphysics, the relationship between life and art, and the complexities of the ‘Australianness’ of Malouf’s work. Revealing much about his own experiences, Le makes a passionate case for the ‘personal, artistic sovereignty’ of all writers. This book is an enthralling meeting of minds and a must-read for lovers of literature.

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.