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What our customer's say!

"A best young writer", One of the few books I've read that I've hated to finish. Funny, sordid, in places, and solid-contemporary-idealist, not just of "questionable morality" as the jacket cover states. The important thing, however, is the writer's skill in projecting memorable prose. The clever writing skill was in many different country-story level cultures. A very pleasurable read and a page turner, to boot. I would highly recomment it, although perhaps one would enjoy it much more if one had prior acquaintance with Vietnamese culture.

"Excellent New Voice in Short Fiction", I was so enthralled with this volume that I read all the stories in under a day. Nam Le is an impressive new writer w/ a well of talent. I was impressed with how diverse the stories were in terms of setting and characters and yet so thematically similar. I highly suggest this to lovers of good fiction and am guessing there will be more to come from this promising author.

"Not Very Good. Here's Why", I completely agree with K.H. It was like Nam Le was looking up the words in a dictionary while he was writing it, in order to impress the reader with his "large" adjectives, instead of telling the story for the story. He was being too excitedly poetic about almost every sentence in the story. That is for poetry, not for realistic fiction. I wonder if he had ever read Hemingway or Heller. I just can't relate to the characters in the story due to Nam Le's lack of development and understanding for the characters of his book. Admittedly, I give him credit for his endeavor for writing while looking up the "large" words in a dictionary, if he should get any credit at all! The plots were bad and completely incoherent. The characters did not feel real at all. I don't know if it's the overly done ethnic type of writing or overall, just not a very good piece of writing. He should have some inventiveness to let the characters in the story tell the story. That way it is more believable when the reader reads it. For those of you who enjoy all of Nam Le's rambling. Have fun! For me, I'll just look for something else more believable to read.

"Problematic Poetry", Beautifully written stories. But...so intense that they actually hurt, and take a while to "get over." Literally speaking, that's a good thing! I'm still reeling. But I know that these stories are well worth reading, and that this author is very, very gifted. It's not often that I encounter a "short story" author who can affect me, as a reader, to such a degree. This collection is for serious readers and/or serious students of literature: it's that good.

"The Boat by Nam Le", This is captivating to read and size of book easy to carry while travelling. Short stories are touching and incredible cultural insight to each story's background setting in different countries. It left me wanting for more. Nam Le is indeed a master at his craft.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Fantastic new viewpoint in fiction", It's a challenge to come up with something that feels wholly original as a fiction writer. Mr. Le definitely makes strides toward this in THE BOAT. 100% recommended.

"A Short Story Collection that Examines the "Ethnic Literature Thing"", THE BOAT is an engaging and free-wheeling collection of seven short stories by first-timer Nam Le, organized in a cleverly self-referential package. In the pivotal first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" (a title drawn from William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950), a young Vietnamese American lawyer-turned-aspiring author named Nam is visited by his father, just arrived from Australia. Nam has settled in Iowa to attend the renowned Iowa Writer's Workshop.

As he struggles to meet its creative demands and beat his own writer's block, a friend encourages Nam simply to write about Vietnam, since "ethnic literature's hot." Another friend differs: "It's a license to bore. The characters are always flat, generic." It's that last friend who tosses out as an aside, "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans - and New York painters with hemorrhoids." And thus is THE BOAT.

The second story follows the perilous life of Juan Pablo Merendez, an adolescent assassin in Medillin, Colombia as he is called to task by his boss for failing to carry out an execution. Next comes "Meeting Elise," the story of an aging, hemorrhoid-afflicted painter seeking desperately to make amends with his estranged (and engaged) daughter as she makes her Carnegie Hall debut as a concert cellist. Another story, titled simpy "Hiroshima," traces the life of a young Japanese girl moved to the safety of the nearby countryside in the days immediately preceding the dropping of the atomic bomb. "Hiroshima" is sandwiched between two other stories, one a "coming of age" story in a coastal Australian town, the other a "coming to life's purpose" story in Tehran, Iran. After this whirlwind tour, Nam Le returns for the finale to Vietnam for his title story, "The Boat." Not surprisingly, this one is a flight and survival story, focusing on Mai, a young girl cast adrift for days in the Pacific with two hundred other refugees on a smugglers' trawler that has lost its engines.

So what to make of the metastructure? In Nam Le's opening story, the writer Nam succumbs to the pressure of his writing assignment and opts to "exploit the Vietnamese thing." He interviews his father, a survivor of the My Lai massacre, and converts this horrific story relatively quickly and easily into typewritten copy. He awakens the next morning to discover that his father has read and then destroyed the one and only copy. Has Nam Le the author discarded ethnic literature of his own (the figurative tearing up of the My Lai story by his fictional father in the first story) for that of Colombians, Japanese, Iranians, and Australians? And has he, upon attempting to step outside his own ethnicity and into the skins of others, returned unsatisfied to his own Vietnamese experience for his closing story? Is the reader intended to compare the relative merits of Nam's own ethnic (Vietnam-based) stories with those drawn from the world at large? Or are we to see the opening and closing stories as literary "brackets" of the immigrant/ethnic literature genre, one a tale of departure or escape, the other of adaptation and assimilation?

There seems little doubt that the opening and closing stories are Nam Le's most affecting. The opener is touching in its treatment of intergenerational relationships and differences in perception, while the closer is a harrowing tale of sun, salt, thirst, and death for the sake of freedom. In between, the other stories show notable flashes of literary command, but only the "Cartegena" story in Colombia engages the reader with anything approaching the story-telling power of the opening and closing Vietnamese stories.

Perhaps Nam's fictional friend in his opening story is correct, that one writes best about what one knows best, that it really is best to "totally exploit" ethnic literature. In Nam Le's case, THE BOAT shows an emerging authorial talent that promises the possibility of compelling ethnic literature as well as a future range well beyond "the Vietnamese thing." It is quite easy to recommend this book on its merits and also advise readers to keep a watchful eye out for Nam Le's next effort.


"Wonderful collection", An excellent debut collection of short stories. I particularly liked the author's ability to inhabit different peoples and places and points of view. I never expected to jump around, geographically and otherwise, quite so much as the stories moved, which took me, quite pleasantly, by surprise. Le's prose style is pensive and smooth and it can soar. Very good stuff here; I look forward to other works by Nam Le.

"impressive debut", although i think "halflead bay" was suppose to be the climactic piece in the collection, my favorite was "hiroshima." i don't know, it might have been the constant repetitions of the japanese slogan ("one hundred million deaths with honor!") that haunted me, especially coming from the narrator a young child but after i finished that story i got chills.

i was afraid he was going to be lahiri-esque but was pleasantly surprised to find that his prose was lyrical, choppy and abstract; very real, in other words. and he's young, only 29 i think.

the biggest triumph of the book is how seamlessly he writes about other people (besides asians) and i think this is really shocking for readers, for critics especially -- that a non-white writer can do that. le's "the boat" succeeds in all the ways that chang rae lee's "aloft" failed. lahiri, lee they are still trapped in the ethnic dialogue, and i don't blame them...it's of their generation. but i'm relieved, freakin celebrating the fact that the immigrant experience, while valuable and eye-opening is being treated with a critical eye now, one that appraises it more honestly especially in comparison to other, more probing questions that we all, immigrant or not, share.

structurally speaking, i liked the fact that his writing was very disparate, wave-like almost. he's a very visual writer, that said, in the last two stories (tehran calling and the boat), i didn't know what was going on sometimes...which might have been the point.


"An amazing literary work written in elegant and clear prose", Perhaps this is the year of short stories. In April Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" was published to the delight of lovers of short stories. And now this dazzling debut, a collection of seven short stories titled "The Boat", by Nam Le. Even though he is only 29 years old, he writes with the wisdom of a very old and experienced writer. The title story is very long, and reads like a novella.

Unlike Lahiri's stories which are mostly about the lives and experiences of immigrants from India in the United States of America, Mr. Le's stories take place around the world, in Vietnam , Iran, United States, Australia, in the slums of Columbia in South America, and in Iowa, and in cities like Manhattan. The first story with a very long and curious title of "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice", has elements of autobiography, because its protagonist, a man named Nam who, like the author, was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. And like the author, he is a lawyer who goes to Iowa to take a course in writing. His father suddenly decides to visit him, and a reader can feel the uncomfortable tension between the father and the son. I felt that the father was quite abusive towards his son, lashing him mercilessly, when the writer was a boy.

Of all the stories, I liked "Meeting Elise", about an old painter named Henry Luff, who is dying from terminal cancer, and who decides to meet his estranged daughter, Elise, in a fancy restaurant at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan. It is a very moving story.

Mr. Nam Le's prose is elegant, smooth, and almost lyrical. The sentences shine because of their clarity: "The truth was, he'd come at the worst possible time. I was in my last year at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; it was late November, and my final story for the semester was due in three days. I had a backlog of papers to grade and a heap of fellowship and job applications to draft and submit. It was no wonder I was drinking so much."

This is indeed an amazing and very impressive debut. I wouldn't be surprised if it wins major literary awards such as the Pulitzer or the National Book Award.

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