Friday November 19, 7pm – Poetry & Prose
Linh Dinh & Ocean Vuong
Linh Dinh author of Love Like Hate: A Novel ($16.95 Seven Stories Press)
Protagonists Kim Lan and Hoang Long marry in Saigon during the Vietnam War, uniting in a setting that allows Linh Dinh’s dark, deadpan humor to flourish. Describing his mushrooming cast of characters in unsentimental and sometimes absurd ways, Dinh embraces contradictions with the surreal exuberance of Matthew Sharpe and the stylistic élan of Italo Calvino. A recipient of the Pew Fellowship, the David T. Wong Fellowship, and the Asian American Literary Award, Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap; and four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, Borderless Bodies, and Jam Alerts. He is editor of the anthologies Night, Again and Three Vietnamese Poets. Love Like Hate is his first novel.
“[Linh] Dinh’s abrupt epiphanies mix A.D.D. with Thoreau’s economy, Calvino’s globe-trotting, and a pungent eroticism reminiscent of Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.”—The Village Voice
“[Linh Dinh’s Blood and Soap] owes a certain debt to Jorge Luis Borges, but uses Borgesian metafiction and genre-bending to depict a sense of absurdity, confusion, and displacement peculiar to being a contemporary world citizen.”—Matthew Sharpe, The Brooklyn Rail
Ocean Vuong author of Burnings ($10.00 Sibling Rivalry Press)
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong currently resides in New York City as an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appear in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK among others. (<a href=”www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com”>www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com</a>)