Behind the Red Mist offers for the first time in English a wide range of stories from an important writer of the post-war generation in Vietnam. Ho Anh Thai is known for his bitingly sharp and gently whimsical fiction.

Nguyen Khai's documentary novel, "Past Continuous, "published in the early 1980s before the "doi moi" policy was introduced, gives a fascinating inside view of North Vietnamese views and strategies during the American War in Vietnam. As the three narrators exchange reminiscences, we not only learn about the inner-workings of the liberation movement, but we also see the tensions that developed afterward in their post-war society. The novel dramatizes the histories, adventures, and emotions of three extraordinary people-- a secret agent, a female battalion commander, and a Catholic priest who...

"Crossing the River "presents a wide range of Nguyen Huy Thiep's short fiction, both realistic stories in contemporary settings and retellings of folk myths that serve as contemporary parables. When Thiep's stories first appeared in the 1980s, they set off a chain of debate, not only within intellectual and political circles, but also within the society at large. Typically, the struggles of his characters were about survival, not survival in the context of war or revolution, but survival in the context of the emotional and psychological strength it takes to live within the harsh confines of...

How does the literature of a society that has endured decades of war reflect the echoes of that violence to bodies and spirits while depicting the ordinary lives of men and women who are searching, as all people do, for meaning, for happiness, for normalcy, for love? "Love After War "presents the widest range to date of contemporary writers in Vietnam, men and women who have become part of that country's established canon, as well as young and up-coming writers who have come of age in modern Vietnam. Their stories, published in the most widely read literary journals, magazines and newspapers...

This seventh volume in the Voices from Vietnam Series introduces U. S. readers to another major figure in modern Vietnamese letters. Doan Le is noted for her versatility of style and her originality. As Wayne Karlin notes in his introduction, "she is a master of allegory and gently complex satire; in her stories, a frustrated petitioner, unable to obtain housing can change not only into a fly, but into a gay fly (or a fly pretending to be gay); the dead can mirror the snobberies and passions of the living; a man can try to reason out the complexities of his relationship with his father's...

Beginning in Vietnam shortly after the end of the American war and ending sometime in the 21st century, this 8th volume of Curbstone's Voices from Vietnam Series follows the life of Nguyen Thi My Tiep, a woman writer and a revolutionary, whose girlhood is spent as a guerrilla fighter, and whose post-war life becomes a search for personal liberation and individual love. Tiep's struggles are seamlessly connected to the changes her country is going through, as Da Ngan's daring and controversial novel draws us into the life of a woman who insists on leading a meaningful and honest life--as a...