Nam Le. (2008). The Boat. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nam Le. 2008. The Boat. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nam Le, The Boat. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008.

Nam Le. The Boat. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Le, Nam
   • bioText:

     Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. His work has appeared in Zoetrope, A Public Space, One Story, Conjunctions, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. The fiction editor of the Harvard Review, he splits his time between Australia and abroad.
     www.namleonline.com

   • name: Nam Le

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title

The Boat

fullDescription

The seven stories in Nam Le's masterful collection take us across the globe, guiding us to the heart of what it means to be human. From the slums of Colombia to Iowa City and from the streets of Tehran to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, here are thrilling versatile tales that herald the arrival of a remarkable new writer.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content:

     "Nam Le's lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power. . . . A remarkable collection."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Mary Gaitskill
   • content: "Nam Le is extraordinary, a writer who must - who will - be heard. . . .The Boat's vision and its power are timeless."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Times Book Review
   • content: "Astounding. . . . A refreshingly diverse and panoramic debut."
4. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: "Extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated. . . . Moving and unforgettable."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Junot Díaz
   • content: "Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . . . . Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The Miami Herald
   • content: "Lyrical . . . Powerful and assured. . . . [Le's] kaleidoscopic world view is on display throughout the stories, which seamlessly blend cultural traditions, accents and landscapes that run from lush to barren."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Oregonian
   • content: "Stunning. . . .These stories are so beautifully written and cross emotional barriers of time and place with such clear vision and strong command of language we can only wonder with awe what Nam Le will offer us next."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Marion Frisby, The Denver Post
   • content: "A collection that takes the reader across the globe. From Iowa to Colombia to Australia and Iran, the characters in Le's stories each shape the world around them. In each story, the protagonists create a new atmosphere. . . .While Le is a writer who seems to be interested in the issues of the world, he is also a writer interested in the young. . . . Le does not downplay the lives of his children as fiction often does when portraying younger characters but presents them with a seriousness and intelligence that is refreshing. . . . The Boat is an impressive debut from a writer with a lot more to give. A writer to be remembered."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Amy Driscoll, The Miami Herald
   • content: "Powerful . . . Lyrical . . . Devastating . . . A harsh and masterful effort, each tale a clean shot through the heart, the aim true. In seven stories covering six continents and an ocean, Le delivers a powerful and assured vision that offers a clear look at his impressive talents. . . . Le is the sort of writer who taps directly into the vein of desperation and offers no shelter. He's not for the faint of heart, but the reward for soldiering on in the toughness of his world is the welcome recognition of a voice clear and brave."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Robert L. Pincus, San Diego Union-Tribune
    • content: "Captivating . . . An uncannily mature debut [that] distills time, experience . . . There's a streak of the naturalist in Nam Le that looks back to such writers as Emile Zola, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. . . . It is a searing portrait of survival, love and sacrifice, which seems revelatory and wise. It is [Le's] ethnic story that transcends ethnicity."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Guy Raz, correspondent, All Things Considered
    • content: "[The Boat] takes the reader from the South China Sea to Medellin, Colombia, to Tehran and beyond–places that, in many cases, Nam Le has never visited. . . . What struck me about ['Tehran Calling'] was how vivid the imagery of the city of Tehran appears–the Shiite Ashura procession, with the self-flagellation, the rutted roads, [he] talks about the stale fluorescent writing at the airport . . . [Nam Le] writes so convincingly about these places [he's] never been to . . ."
12. • premium: False
    • source: John Freeman, Newark Star-Ledger
    • content: "Astonishing . . . Not yet 30, Le effortlessly gives all seven tales in The Boat a different register, structure, vocabulary and tone.. . . . The miracle of these stories is how their author, by sleight of hand and virtue of skill, puts his searching, observant voice wherever he likes."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor
    • content: "Moving . . . The opening story in Nam Le's debut collection, The Boat, is as dazzling an introduction to a writer's work as I've read. . . . Nam Le digs beneath the surface and unfailingly sees the bundles as human in these accomplished stories about the terrible reverberations of violence."
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 31, 2008
      From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In “Halflead Bay,” an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of “Meeting Elise,” a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies—“You could totally
      exploit the Vietnamese thing,” says a fellow student to Nam—are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory (Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Australia) and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2008
      Born in Vietnam, Le was raised in Australia, where he trained as a lawyer, and came to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop. So it might panic a few readers that the protagonist of the first story in this stellar debut collection is the Vietnam-born Nam, a former lawyer from Australia trying to meet a deadline at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when his estranged father blows into town. Will this be a bunch of autobiographical stories exemplifying "ethnic fiction" (which the story actually manages, rather slyly, to dismiss)? Absolutely notunless Le is also a 14-year-old assassin in Colombia, asked to kill a friend; a crotchety if successful painter coming to terms with a cancer diagnosis just as the daughter he's never met prepares for her Carnegie Hall debut; a high school boy in Australia who's achieved a modest sports victory and must face down a bully as his mother faces death; and an American woman visiting a friend in Tehran who risks her life battling the regime. Le writes rawly rigorous stories that capture entire worlds; each character is distinctive and fully fleshed out, each plot eventful as a full-length novel but artfully compressed. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/08.]Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

      Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2008
      This collection of seven short stories and novellas features four works that were previously issued in literary publications and three new to this volume. Stories are set on six continents and at sea, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and have characters ranging in age from childhood through the senior years. Many explore the intricate loyalties and betrayals in family life: notably, Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, in which a Vietnamese Australian 'migr' studying at the University of Iowas writers program experiences his fathers final brutality, and Halflead Bay, in which a teenage boy struggles with the father and brother who rescue him from a vicious schoolmate. Less-memorable characters are portrayed through intense physical and sexual description. They are brought to life in powerful stories of love and death through a muscular yet delicate style: lyrical, often poetic, leaving the obvious unsaid and endings ambiguous. Readers of Philip Roth and Andr' Brink, as well as those who enjoy complex and emotion-charged short fiction, will devour this book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)

popularity

39

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