About the Author

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. Currently the fiction editor of the "Harvard Review, " he has published work in "Zoetrope: All Story," "A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, " and "The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. "He divides his time between Australia and the United States.

Reviews

"Remarkable . . . "The Boat" catches people in moments of extremis, confronted by death or loss or terror (or all three) and forced to grapple at the most fundamental level with who they are and what they want or believe. Whether it's the prospect of dying at sea or being shot by a drug kingpin or losing family members in a war, Nam Le's people are individuals trapped in the crosshairs of fate, forced to choose whether they will react like deer caught in the headlights, or will find a way to confront or disarm the situation. The opening story of this volume, 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, ' and its singular masterpiece, features a narrator who shares a name and certain biographical details with the author . . . The other tales in this book, however, circumnavigate the globe, demonstrating Mr. Le's astonishing ability to channel the experiences of a multitude of characters, from a young child living in Hiroshima during World War II to a 14-year-old hit man in the barrios of Medellin to a high school jock in an Australian beach town. Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among longtime authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history.
By far the most powerful, most fully realized story in this collection, 'Love and Honor' begins as a fairly conventional account of a young writer suffering from writer's block and trying to cope with an unwanted visit from his father, who has flown in from Australia to see him. . . . As this story unfolds, itbecomes a meditation not just on fathers and sons, but also on the burdens of history and the sense of guilt and responsibility that survivors often bequeath to their children. . . . [Le's] sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power. . . . In the two stories that bookend this collection, he conveys what it might be like to have the Vietnam War as an inescapable fact of daily life, infecting every relationship and warping the trajectory of one's life. In 'The Boat' he does so directly with devastating results; in 'Love and Honor' he does so elliptically, creating a haunting marvel of a story that says as much about familial dreams and burdens as it does about the wages of history."
-Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"Twenty-nine-year-old Nam Le demonstrates the aesthetic ambition and sentence-making chops of a much more experienced writer. . . . Each moment of technical brio [in the opening story] deepens the dramatization of the all-but-unspeakable power of love between parent and child. By the end, any perceptive reader will agree that the 'world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable.' . . . Each [story] contemplates love with a sometimes unnerving ferocity. The range of settings and points of view in "The Boat" beggars belief, not least because the stories never betray an errant trace of the research that surely informs them. . . . [The title story] ends with an unforgettable scene of love and heartbreak. In each [story], Le parts veil after veil of illusion . . . Even if these stories were just competent, 'Halflead Bay' would make "The Boat" one ofthe strongest first books of fiction in the last 10 or 15 years. . . . The plot unfolds with remorseless logic, harsh beauty, and an almost unbearable tenderness that reminded me of "Dubliners. "[The story's] scenes [are] exact in their details and gorgeous in their musicality . . . I've been telling friends about "The Boat" for weeks now, saying 'This guy's got it.' Now I'm telling you. Pass it on."
-John Repp, Cleveland "Plain Dealer"
"Four stars . . . The stories [in "The Boat"] connect across country, class and circumstance-not only through Le's ambition to nail each milieu, but through his obsession with the ways people live in and reveal their cultures . . . Each story immerses readers in its own distant setting. The book's success isn't just a matter of scene-setting; it also depends on Le's characters and his classic, coincidences-explained-later plotting. He'll make you marvel at the web his South American hit men are caught in, and he'll make you worry for them. . . . In a piece about an Iranian activist and the clueless white friend who comes to visit her, he writes the part of the American interloper with sympathy and aplomb. . . . Le offers real insight."
-Sophie Fels, "Time Out New York"
"Seven stories set around the globe-from Iowa to Tehran, Manhattan to Australia, and Colombia to Hiroshima-make up Vietnam-born Nam Le's dynamic debut collection, "The Boat, "in which achingly familiar alliances converge in ingeniously unlikely places."
-Lisa Shea, "Elle"
"Wide-ranging, knife-sharp stories by a masterly 29-year-old. Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, yet his debut collection of stories, "The Boat, "reveals as mature and certain anAmerican voice as just about any native-born writer twice his age. His prose evokes Philip Roth's-sure of itself, clean, and invisibly effective. These muscular and psychologically rich narratives take place in the United States, Australia, Colombia, and in a storm-tossed boat in the South China Sea [and] contend with a startlingly wide array of characters . . . What's notable is the structural soundness of these powerful and far-ranging pieces: Each one is built to exactly the shape, and flows in exactly the tone and language, that will suit the needs of the story. The final and longest story in the book, 'The Boat, ' takes on the deepest issues of life, love, and death, something worthy of Conrad or James. Nam Le is a remarkably sophisticated new writer."
-Vince Passaro, "O, The Oprah Magazine"
"Stories rooted in war and history [that] frequently zoom in on the affairs of characters who have to live with the consequences. . . . Le uses his wonderfully flexible prose style to explore Vietnamese ethnic identity, writing workshops, and even plain old drunkenness."
-Colin Marshall, "The Santa Barbara Independent"
"Stories [that] are reflective of their writer: eclectic, diverse, true in their toughness and giving in their complexity. . . . Two gems [are] 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, ' [which] is art at its highest form, incorporating satire, metafiction, homage, and social critique into a story about a writer and his father and the infamous My Lai Massacre, [and] the title story 'The Boat' [which] is filled with so much emotional truth, it borders the line with non-fiction. . . . It turned a tale into an experience and brought us that much closer to one another."
-Ky-Phong Tran, "Nguoi Viet Daily News"
"[Nam Le's] personal history is as compelling and engrossing as any of his writing. . . . A debut collection of seven taut, geographically diverse stories . . . Le could be the next big thing [and] the opening story, 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, ' goes a good distance to proving it."
-Robert Birnbaum, "The Morning News
"
"So engaging, so unequivocally well done, ["The Boat"] is sure to appeal to any fan of good writing. From the opening tale, it's hard not to be giddy. ['Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice'] is a brilliantly self-conscious and humorous slice of the writing life, which doubles as a poignant story about fathers and sons and family tragedies. . . . Things only get better from there. Nam Le is a chameleon of voices and points of view, leading the reader through the experiences of an older man, a disillusioned young woman, a boy on the cusp of adulthood, and a teenage girl. "The Boat" takes us all over the world with fantastic verisimilitude. . . . 'Halflead Bay' is an enviable achievement-an adolescent's battle to find courage as his life begins to turn upside down, the story developed with perfect suspense. . . . And the title story offers urgency, poignancy and heartbreaking tragedy. As if the stories themselves weren't enough to make "The Boat "a worthy summer read, the skill of the author is a spectacle to behold. He manages to avoid so many pitfalls. He doesn't shy away from stark and disturbing images, for example, yet he doesn't rely on the grotesque to create effective writing. The reader can sense his personal investment in the work, but the stories aren't even close to self-indulgent. It's enough to give a person a literary crush. Each story is dark and deep, exquisitely constructed and beautifully told. Nam Le is a studied, competent and graceful writer, and "The Boat "is both a contemporary treasure and a harbinger of good things to come."
-Jessica Inman, "BookPage"
"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 [collection] be a bunch of autobiographical stories exemplifying 'ethnic fiction' (which the story actually managed, rather slyly, to dismiss)? Absolutely not-unless 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."
-Barbara Hoffert,"Librar

"Seven stories set around the globe-from Iowa to Tehran, Manhattan to Australia, and Colombia to Hiroshima-make up Vietnam-born Nam Le's dynamic debut collection, "The Boat, "in which achingly familiar alliances converge in ingeniously unlikely places."
-Lisa Shea, "Elle"
"Wide-ranging, knife-sharp stories by a masterly 29-year-old. Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, yet his debut collection of stories, "The Boat, "reveals as mature and certain an American voice as just about any native-born writer twice his age. His prose evokes Philip Roth's-sure of itself, clean, and invisibly effective. These muscular and psychologically rich narratives take place in the United States, Australia, Colombia, and in a storm-tossed boat in the South China Sea [and] contend with a startlingly wide array of characters . . . What's notable is the structural soundness of these powerful and far-ranging pieces: Each one is built to exactly the shape, and flows in exactly the tone and language, that will suit the needs of the story. The final and longest story in the book, 'The Boat, ' takes on the deepest issues of life, love, and death, something worthy of Conrad or James. Nam Le is a remarkably sophisticated new writer."
-Vince Passaro, "O, The Oprah Magazine"
"So engaging, so unequivocally well done, ["The Boat"] is sure to appeal to any fan of good writing. From the opening tale, it's hard not to be giddy. ['Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice'] is a brilliantly self-conscious and humorous slice of the writing life, which doubles as a poignant story about fathers and sons and family tragedies. . . . Things only get better from there. Nam Le is achameleon of voices and points of view, leading the reader through the experiences of an older man, a disillusioned young woman, a boy on the cusp of adulthood, and a teenage girl. "The Boat" takes us all over the world with fantastic verisimilitude. . . . 'Halflead Bay' is an enviable achievement-an adolescent's battle to find courage as his life begins to turn upside down, the story developed with perfect suspense. . . . And the title story offers urgency, poignancy and heartbreaking tragedy. As if the stories themselves weren't enough to make "The Boat "a worthy summer read, the skill of the author is a spectacle to behold. He manages to avoid so many pitfalls. He doesn't shy away from stark and disturbing images, for example, yet he doesn't rely on the grotesque to create effective writing. The reader can sense his personal investment in the work, but the stories aren't even close to self-indulgent. It's enough to give a person a literary crush. Each story is dark and deep, exquisitely constructed and beautifully told. Nam Le is a studied, competent and graceful writer, and "The Boat "is both a contemporary treasure and a harbinger of good things to come."
-Jessica Inman, "BookPage"
"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 [collection] be a bunch of autobiographical stories exemplifying 'ethnic fiction' (which the story actually managed, rather slyly, to dismiss)? Absolutely not-unless Le is also a 14-year-old assassin in Colombia, asked to kill a friend; a crotchety if successfulpainter 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."
-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
"["The Boat "is] set on six continents and at sea, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, [with] characters ranging in age from childhood through the senior years. Many [of the stories] 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 emigre studying at the University of Iowa's writers' program experiences his father's final brutality, and 'Halflead Bay, ' in which a teenage boy struggles with the father and brother who rescue him from a vicious schoolmate. [The characters] 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 will devour this book."
-Ellen Loughran, "Booklist"
"A breathtakingly assured collection of stories-powerful, moving, unsparingly honest-exhibiting a narrative confidence and range that is as remarkable as it is mature. A tremendous debut."
-William Boyd, author of "Any Human Heart
"
"From a Colombian slum to the streetsof Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. . . . The opening [story] features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's when his father comes for a tense visit . . . The story's ironies are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure."
-"Publishers Weekly "(starred review)
"A polished and intense debut of astonishing range. Some of the stories border on novellas, and this allows the author more latitude to develop the complexity of his characters. The opening story is a brilliantly conceived narrative about a writer called Nam . . . When his father, a Vietnamese immigrant interrupts both Nam's schedule and his personal life, Nam begins to fret, for he's worried about being able to produce a story on the tight deadline he faces. He's not interested in falling back on the 'typical' survival story about Vietnamese boat people, and he remembers that at an earlier time his father confessed to having witnessed the My Lai massacre as a boy of 14. This revelation leads Nam to a stunning realization about the nature of father-son relationships, and his epiphany becomes the true subject of his story. . . Ironically, and slyly, with a nod to the opening story, the final piece, which gives the book its name, is an imaginative reconstruction for what it felt like to be a boat person, to launch into a 12-day journey with no foreseeable end. Consummately self-assured."
-"Kirkus Reviews"
"Stellar . . . The unusually various characters in Nam Le's excellent debut collection live between worlds. . . . The book's seven stories are also diverse in setting and mode. Consequently, the reader . . . becomes a participant in Le's transglobal examination of lives being lived in mental and physical border zones.
Le leaps from world to world with the help of his unusually supple prose. It can shift over the course of a page from intense, detailed understatement to the workmanlike to the searingly eloquent. The textures of prose found among the stories are equally distinct. . . . In "The Boat"'s opening story, Le's fictional alter ego . . . [is] drafting a story, much like the one we are reading, that simultaneously enacts, dismantles, and expands on the genre." The Boat" manages to breathe similarly fresh air into the overly familiar idea of the short-story collection. The result is bracing."
-Laird Hunt, "Bookforum"
"Nam Le is extraordinary. His editor remarked to me that he 'must be heard'; I would add that he "will" be heard, that "The Boat" will be read for as long as people read books. Its vision and its power are timeless."
-Mary Gaitskill, author of "Bad Behavior" and "Veronica"
"Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . . . an extraordinary performance by a fine new talent. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten."
-Junot Diaz, author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"
"It is obvious as one starts these stories that they explore a vast geographical landscape, but what becomes clear as one moves forward is that they plumb a similarly vast emotional and intellectual one, and they do so with poignancy and with wit. Nam Le's pyrotechnics as a story-teller never distract from the brilliant heart that has conceived and written these gripping narratives of love's uncertainty and loss's inevitability."
-Andrew Solomon, author of "The Noonday Demon
"
"From the very first page of "The Boat," Nam Le's extraordinary talent, range of vision, and moral courage make the reader sit up and take notice. By the last page, one feels a kind of fervent gratitude-rare enough these days-for having been introduced to a young writer whose mark on the literary world, so freshly made, will only grow deeper in the years to come."
-John Burnham Schwartz, author of "The Commoner "and "Reservation Road
"
"Nam Le writes with a rare blend of courage and beauty. His prose has a stunning clarity that works perfectly with the constant flow of narrative surprises. Book your passage on "The Boat." You will not forget the people you meet on the voyage."
-Chris Offutt, author of "The Same River Twice
"
""The Boat" is tremendous, challenging and ambitious, worthy of the same shelf that holds "Dubliners" and "The Things They Carried"-like those works, it asks to be read as a whole and taken seriously as a book. In it, storms gather but no one seems able to respond; violence leads to confusion instead of clarity; love provokes rather